What Early Software Was Influential Enough To Deserve Acclaim?

theodp writes "That his 28-year-old whip-smart, well-educated CS grad friend could be unaware of MacWrite and MacPaint took Dave Winer by surprise. 'They don't, for some reason,' notes Winer, 'study these [types of seminal] products in computer science. They fall between the cracks of "serious" study of algorithms and data structures, and user interface and user experience (which still is not much-studied, but at least is starting). This is more the history of software. Much like the history of film, or the history of rock and roll.' So, Dave asks, what early software was influential and worthy of a Software Hall of Fame?"

Comments

VisiCalc

[YrWrstNtmr]

'nuff said

Re:VisiCalc

[YrWrstNtmr]

And if you want to continue:
GeoWorks

Re:VisiCalc

[astralagos]

Indeed. If there's a piece of software that launched the personal computing revolution, it was VisiCalc - the first software business actually _needed_. I'd also throw in: * WordStar - which was the PC world's answer to emacs. If you did text processing on DOS systems, it was done with WordStar or another program which emulated it. * WordPerfect - the word processor, I imagine that without the Windows Hegemony, Microsoft would -never- have been able to kill wordperfect * Bank Street Writer - the first -educational- word processor, I imagine X'ers like myself lived off of this in school

Re:VisiCalc

[OneAhead]

Xerox Alto / Xerox Star (Sheesh!)

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

^this

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Zork.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

VisiCalc was actually credited by a few business journalists in the 80s for starting the whole corporate raider business. They were now able to plug in all those numbers from SEC filings and other sources into the spreadsheet, run simulations of financing and figure a way to take the company over and make their billions.

They also used it to find out if the pension fund was over funded. See, back in the old days, companies would invest the pension in very low risk things like government bonds - at like 3%. The raiders said, "Hey wait a minute! If we put the money in the stock market, it could make 10% a year - because that's what it averaged for decades! They don't need all that cash in their and we can use it to finance the deal and pay our "consulting fees"!"

Flash forward to the '00s, and pensioners are getting their benefits cut left and right or they are just gone.

KKR, Icahn, T Boone, and Bain Capital (of Mitt Romney fame) were and are some of the players.

Now, many of those folks don't have the money that they counted on - their deferred compensation. Another way of putting it is those folks weren't fully paid for their work.

Re:VisiCalc

[theskipper]

Agree that Zork was influential but, in fairness, Colossal Cave was its progenitor.

Re:VisiCalc

[K. S. Kyosuke]

What about the META-II/TREE-META line of meta-compilers?

Re:VisiCalc

[sjames]

Now, many of those folks don't have the money that they counted on - their deferred compensation. Another way of putting it is those folks weren't fully paid for their work.

I find it amazing how little attention is paid to that. Some like to blame pensions for bankrupting the auto industry, but the fact is, until shenanigans like that, they had the pension funds in reserve like they were supposed to. If they don't have them now, it's only because of greed at the top, not something the union did.

Re:VisiCalc

[Colonel Korn]

'nuff said

And as a hardware corollary, the 80 column video card that allowed visicalc to show a useful amount of screen real estate.

Re:VisiCalc

[K. S. Kyosuke]

(I completely forgot to mention that these had one of the key roles in the development of Douglas Engelbart's "oN-Line System", which some of you may have heard about :-) and which belongs to this list on its own.)

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, I remember people wanting a 'VisiCalc' machine. Idiots :P
That was a long time ago :O

Re:VisiCalc

[Deep Esophagus]

Before Wordstar, there was Electric Pencil. I also compared Apple Writer II vs. Wordstar for a technical presentation in some college class in 1982; I declared at the time that Apple Writer was far and away the most advanced and user-friendly WP on the market.

I find it amusing that some 30 years later, some of the old Wordstar keyboard shortcuts are still used in some programs today -- notably alt-X, ctrl-Y, and F1 still do essentially the same things they did in Wordstar.

I think someone else mentioned Colossal Cave, and yes indeedy -- CC begat Zork which begat the rest of Infocom's amazing library, which I still play from time to time today. My 20-something daughter just the other day complained about the difficulty of getting the babel fish in your ear! Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?>

Re:VisiCalc

[demonlapin]

If they don't have them now, it's only because of greed at the top, not something the union did.

If the union can't even be bothered to take control of its own members' pensions out of the hands of management, it's their fault.

Re:VisiCalc

[Will.Woodhull]

1. Visicalc, of course. It is what changed the Apple ][ from a toy to a valuable business asset.

2. Lotus 1.2.3, the better VisiCalc, and now for DOS machines!

3. The first flight simulator for the Apple ][.

4. WordStar on CP/M (later on DOS), proving that effective word processing could be done without a dedicated word processing network. 5. Perl--- the first truly useful, easy to learn (hard to master) programming language supporting regular expressions. (Well, awk preceded it, but awk was impossible to work with.)

There were also several raster and vector graphics apps from the 1980s that demonstrated the breadth of possibilities.

I have avoided the software that was originally created on mini frame and main frame computers, then duplicated on the microcomputers. These were great, but they did not have the "Oh wow, nobody saw that coming" impact of Visicalc, WordStar, or Perl.

Yes, any decent Computer Science program should definitely have some required courses in how and why these apps changed the world.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather depressingly I still get reactions like that when showing someone you can add things up in Excel *without a calculator*.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

VisiOn

Re:VisiCalc

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yes, several folks beat me to Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc, and of course WordStar from San Rafael, California.

Add Castle Wolfenstein - the Apple ][ side-scroller - and TurboPascal. Heck! Sidekick and Borland's .ovl file function layouts.

Re:VisiCalc

[sjames]

So you're saying the Union should have taken over management? What would management do then? Pension was part of employee compensation, like payroll. Are you saying the union should have taken over that too?

Re:VisiCalc

[Samantha Wright]

Which, it should be emphasized, we do study. While I'm a major advocate for the study of computer history, CS is not about software development, it is a branch of mathematics. The author of the article would be better off pestering computer engineers.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Alt-F1=help was used by IBM 5250 (1977) and I thought they popularised F1 = help at some time.

Certainly MacWrite, MacPaint and VisiCalc were important, but also HyperCard, SABRE, SPICE were important. Not to mention Mosaic of course. And let us not forget malware like the Morris worm.

Re:VisiCalc

[jfdavis668]

I still have a copy of this, which can run on 32 bit Windows. Amazing what we used to use.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

VisiCalc for sure! I was in the time sharing business in the 1980s and most of what we did was custom financial "decision support software". The first time I saw VisiCalc I just about had a heart attack as I envisioned all our business going up in smoke. (And it did!) Wow.

Lotus 1-2-3 version 1A, which I worked with, was something like 85 K bytes. That's some coding!

Re:VisiCalc

[noh8rz9]

kings quest. I would single out kings quest III, where the series came into its own.

Re:VisiCalc

[Stupendoussteve]

And then Windows came along and integrated Lotus 1.2.3. with Miami Vice.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Governments should, in their next contract renewal with every union, demand that the unions take over (from that point on) managing of pension funds. The unions and governments would negotiate whatever "per hour" amount the government would pay to the union to fund the pensions. Then, the people managing the pension (the union) would be accountable to those relying on benefits (the employees). If the union members don't trust the union to invest/manage their pensions, they can simply elect new leadership.

As it is now, politicians make promises they won't be around to keep (having long since retired). It doesn't both the politicians one bit that children not yet born are going to have to pay for the promises they made in exchange for union support in the next election. Disgraceful.

Union members should be in favor of this proposal. They must know there is no possibility that the pension promises will be kept in many cases -- it just won't be possible to extract enough money from future taxpayers because they will refuse to vote for such taxes (and, perhaps just move to a state, county, city that managed their pension promises more responsibility). It's a death spiral and the smart union members must know this.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

I still believe the AT Keyboard had more to do with killing WordPerfect than MicroSoft. Moving the function keys to the top killed all the quick chording ability.

Re:VisiCalc

[danomac]

Clippy!

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Minesweeper's lasted pretty long.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Wordstar. Electric Pencil. Apple Writer II. WordPerfect. XYwrite. ALL really REALLY good programs, one of which (WordPerfect) is still my daily word processor because it still does dozens of things Word can't begin to do. All replaced by one mediocre program: Word.

Who says there's no progress? ME! Who says that software follows the "survival of the fittest?" NOT ME!

Microsoft foisted a third-rate program onto everyone because of it's other offerings, not because it was best. People should look at the history of word processors to get a REAL understanding of what programming is about.

Re:VisiCalc

[Jane Q. Public]

"CS is not about software development, it is a branch of mathematics."

That depends entirely on what college or university you are attending. The definition is still pretty much dependent on the school. Although it has been getting somewhat more consistent.

However: at least in the U.S., computer engineering is definitely NOT a software discipline. It is engineering of the computers themselves, that is to say, hardware (though firmware is involved, naturally).

Re:VisiCalc

[jqpublic13]

Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?

Ummm... Solitaire?

Re:VisiCalc

[Jane Q. Public]

Not sure if this really qualifies as "early" (although some people in the office were still using DOS-based 123), but I would nominate Wolfenstein 3D. First of its genre. I still have a demo version on 3.5" diskette, but I have nothing to put the disk in. Come to think of it, my main operating system isn't MS anymore, so it probably doesn't matter.

Re:VisiCalc

[Teancum]

Clippy is a clear example of what not to do for software, so I suppose that has a point.

And it also provided a route for Bill Gates to get laid (well.... his wife Melinda was one of the original developers for Microsoft Bob). I guess that counts for something even if the software itself wasn't all that impressive. Then again that turns the term "software" into a whole other context.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Minesweeper

Re:VisiCalc

[demonlapin]

No, the union should have seen to it that their pensions were protected. I mean, if they won't do something that basic, what's the point of having a union? Why was the retirement plan in the hands of management ever? The delivery services union has a cross-company pension so that a driver who moves from FedEx to UPS to DHL has retirement savings regardless.

Re:VisiCalc

[Samantha Wright]

Actually, Wolf was preceded by HoverTank 3-D and Catacombs 3-D, both of which were made by the id Software team. Catacombs 3-D would best be classified as the direct progenitor of Wolfenstein 3-D; it had all of the core game features except multiple guns (you picked up different magic missile patterns instead). It even had powerups, including one that froze all of the enemies for a set period of time, a feature not often found in FPSes.

That being said, though, these were all circa 1991. Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure are from 1979 and 1976 respectively. When you realise that there were programs like MacPaint and MacWrite a full decade before the Mac came out, it really makes TFA sound bratty.

Re:VisiCalc

[demonlapin]

Er, governments should not be making contracts with unions. Public employee unions should be illegal. Private sector unions should be in charge of pension funds, though. That way, when the workers get screwed, they don't have anyone to blame but themselves.

Re:VisiCalc

[westlake]

I imagine that without the Windows Hegemony, Microsoft would -never- have been able to kill wordperfect .

WordPerfect was a character based DOS era word processor ported to every platform known to man --- each with own fiefdom within the company. In late 1993, WPC had bloated to 5,500 employees and was bleeding red ink from every pore.

Almost Perfect

Re:VisiCalc

[Daniel Dvorkin]

When you realise that there were programs like MacPaint and MacWrite a full decade before the Mac came out

Could you tell us about these mouse-driven graphics programs and WYSIWYG word processors, running on the desktop, from 1974?

Re:VisiCalc

[Samantha Wright]

The second point, okay. In my experience a lot of CompE students end up taking a large number of software dev courses, and are required to be competent C++ developers to graduate with honours. I guess that's a regional thing. Certainly engineering schools should offer a software stream, though.

And c'mon, product history? That's a community college thing. The words "computer science" literally indicate a science of computations; I know there was an argument about how it should be defined here a few months ago, but even accepting the applied component into the definition (i.e. the theory and practice of what constitutes good software development, like HCI and project management), that's several steps removed from trivia about various specific products and what they did to revolutionize other industries. The author's whole line of reasoning is ignorant of CS is, and why it's associated with the arts and sciences rather than an engineering department.

Re:VisiCalc

[sjames]

Unions HAVE taken over pensions now that they have fully realized how deeply crooked management can be. At the time the pensions in question were negotiated, they probably presumed that management was at least upstanding enough to honor a written legal agreement or failing that the courts would be sufficiently balanced to do the right thing. It appears they were wrong.

Today, the unions have the benefit of experience and know better than to leave a piggy bank alone with anyone in management.

Absolutely none of that in any way detracts from my claim that it is disingenuous to blame the unions for the financial troubles the auto makers and others are suffering now. The pensions didn't break the bank, raiding the pension fund did that. Had the management even pretended to handle the pension fund ethically, they would have no problem paying out pensions today. The fact that there was a pension fund shows that they were sufficiently profitable at the time.

Re:VisiCalc

[calidoscope]

I agree on including SPICE in this mix, in adition to giving us a powerful circuit simulator it also gave us the Berkeley license.

Re:VisiCalc

[Samantha Wright]

Xerox Bravo (1974), Xerox Gypsy (1975), and Xerox Markup (not sure of exact year, in the vicinity). As a general rule, whatever you can think of, PARC had it ten years earlier. By the late eighties they were working on a PDA/tablet/smart surface, touch-driven ecosystem.

Point being—people disproportionate weight on programs that they experienced. It's the same story whenever an amateur writes a computer history article; a few pages of nostalgic bullshit without any real research. Yes, it's significant that the Mac programs (which, oh by the way, already existed on the Lisa, too!) were popular, but severely erroneous to give them all the scrutiny. As historians we should endeavour to look past our own biases and provide an accurate image of history, not play favourites with specific products.

Re:VisiCalc

[interkin3tic]

Don't forget ski free!

Re:VisiCalc

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Talking Moose on Mac, which took advantage of Apple's voice engine.

Re:VisiCalc

[WhatAreYouDoingHere]

My 20-something daughter just the other day complained about the difficulty of getting the babel fish in your ear!

My problem was always trying to catch the pesky babel fish... I haven't played that in ages... Thank God I don't have to hear the poetry..

Re:VisiCalc

[schnell]

No, the union should have seen to it that their pensions were protected. I mean, if they won't do something that basic, what's the point of having a union? Why was the retirement plan in the hands of management ever?

This is what most people don't fully get - it's just not that simple.

Say for example that I have just hired you at age 25 into a new job with a pension that says you have a pension benefit meaning that you will receive 50% of your retirement-age salary (at 65) for the rest of your life. So I now have 40 years to save up to pay you back after retirement, by taking money away from excess profits, or other programs, or even cutting expenses/jobs to fund my pension obligation. The question is, how much do I need to save to pay you?

Since I pay you $50/hour now and post-65 life expectancy for your demographic is 22 years, is 22 years x $25/hour what I need to save? Or do I need to assume that your life expectancy will increase? By how much? Or do I need to assume that you will have been promoted to a higher salary 40 years from now? Or that inflation will have forced me to adjust my percentages?

Most importantly, companies that pay pensions don't just put money under their corporate mattresses for 40 years - they invest it. And if all my investments make 7% per year and I am on track to fulfill my pension obligations - but suddenly the market crashes and my investments are making 3% - then I am now in default. I could have invested more in pensions... say assuming that only a 1% return would keep me whole on pensions... but that would take money away from the shareholders - and potentially keep me from hiring new employees as well because that money is now committed to funding the pension plan.

TL;DR - saving for pensions is not like your personal savings account. It's more like managing the 401(k) for hundreds of thousands of people, and it's easy for things to screw up with no malice aforethought (and overcompensating to make sure pensions are funded tomorrow has negative impacts today, too).

Re:VisiCalc

[interkin3tic]

Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?

Ski free.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Welp! We figured out the problem. For the 10 thousandth time. Where now?

Re:VisiCalc

[miroku000]

Which, it should be emphasized, we do study. While I'm a major advocate for the study of computer history, CS is not about software development, it is a branch of mathematics. The author of the article would be better off pestering computer engineers.

CS is not a branch of mathematics. It also involves software development. A small part of Computer Science is subset of math. But, neither is CS about the history of trendy software. On the other hand, I would have found the History of Trendy Software much more useful than a few of the other core classes I had to take (like sociology and philosophy and such).

Re:VisiCalc

[ChatHuant]

Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?

Well, Microsoft Flight Simulator was launched in 1982, that is almost 35 years ago; Solitaire came with Windows 3.0, in 1990 (and believe me, there are many more people still playing Solitaire than ever played Colossal Cave or Zork). Minesweeper was originally part of the MS Entertainment Pack (also 1990) but was bundled with Windows I believe starting with Windows for Workgroups. Freecell came a bit later, can't remember exactly when, but was there before Win95, which makes it at least 18 years old, I'm sure there are more.

Re:VisiCalc

[spaceyhackerlady]

I agree.

VisiCalc was the first killer app, an app that people would buy a computer so they could run it.

...laura

Re:VisiCalc

[Samantha Wright]

To short-circuit the conversation: if your university's CS department considered that to be true, you probably would have had that course available to you. Software development just gets lumped in with CS because there's not enough demand to make a separate engineering department. This isn't something that became obvious to me until grad school.

Re:VisiCalc

[shmlco]

It's interesting to note that you mentioned that people place a disproportionate weight on programs that they experienced, because in many ways that exactly *is* the point.

That's why MacWrite and MacPaint were mentioned. Not many people had a chance to explore the Xerox PARC labs, or had the $80,000 or so for a Xerox Star system. (Or even a measly $10,000 to spend on a Lisa.) Macintosh popularized the WYSIWYG experience and brought it out out of the labs and before the general public at an affordable price point, much in the same way that the Apple ][ and VisiCalc brought the first PCs out of the S-100 hobbyist realm and into our homes and businesses.

Each was a watershed event, opening the door to more and more users.

As you say, we should endeavour to look past our own biases and provide an accurate image of history...

Re:VisiCalc

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Please explain your rational that public employee unions should be illegal. What makes their job different and why should they not have the power of collective bargaining?

Re:VisiCalc

[TapeCutter]

Conway's Game of Life is one I would include in the history of CS.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

No, minesweeper.

Re:VisiCalc

[Samantha Wright]

I also said it was significant that they were popular—but the inaccessible prototypes need to be put on the highest pedestal. At the same time that products are entering the market and revolutionizing how the world does business and sees computers, new ideas are being found and created that go to power those changes. Without the ideas, the products would not exist; the same cannot be said in reverse. In every other field, priority and recognition is given to those who invent things first, followed by the people who popularized them. (Otherwise, people wouldn't foam at the mouth when it is claimed that Edison invented the lightbulb.) There is no reason why innovations in software should be treated differently.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

> Xerox Alto / Xerox Star (Sheesh!)

Oh, please. The Alto was a prototype, and the Star was a failed commercial product. They only sold about 25,000 of those (which is less than the population of my home town).

Influential in R&D Land? Yes. Influential in the market/? BZZZZZT. Fail!

Re:VisiCalc

[DKlineburg]

No mod points, but I have to agree. Why I like EQ for my first MMO. 8 in one was my first word processor, Doom first first person shooter (I got to play wolfenstien later). Kings quest for puzzle game. Were these the first? No, but they were MY firsts. I do respect all the early stuff that lets me have all that I enjoy today. I do agree with someone above that the article sounds "bratty" i think they put.

Re:VisiCalc

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Well, okay, I'll be damned. Thanks for posting that--I honestly had no idea.

Re:VisiCalc

[ChatHuant]

Bah, math failure, 1982 was only 31 years ago. Still more than the 30 the GP asked for.

Re:VisiCalc

[OneAhead]

From the summary:

So, Dave asks, what early software was influential and worthy of a Software Hall of Fame?

Note the complete absence of the words "in the market".

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

notably alt-X, ctrl-Y, and F1 still do essentially the same things they did in Wordstar.

That is because IBM had the sense to merge all the app vendors' different user interfaces on VAX and PC and came up with a standard that has been used ever since. This was more influential than any single software.

Re:VisiCalc

[funfail]

Freecell came with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, together with Hearts, IIRC.

Re:VisiCalc

[Kupfernigk]

The Mac was truly revolutionary. When I pointed out to my then boss that we could replace our Motorola workstations (at $20000 a go) with Macs at a quarter of the price fully loaded, he decided it was better to keep quiet so nobody got into trouble for spending too much on hardware. MacWrite, MacPaint and Excel may not have been the first of a kind, but they were the first of a kind you could put on someone's desk and have him be productive with them fairly quickly.

Re:VisiCalc

[Kupfernigk]

If public sector worker unions should be illegal, then centralised government should be disbanded because it has a monopoly on providing public sector work.

You view, in fact, is that of the slave owners; we are allowed to combine to enforce slavery, the slaves cannot combine to better their conditions.

It's funny how some Americans bang on about liberty, but want to confine it to corporations and officials.

Re:VisiCalc

[sfsp]

The original Wolfenstein wasn't a side-scroller, it was a top-down map. And if you got killed, you could avoid starting over by flipping open the disk drive, if you were quick...

> Add Castle Wolfenstein - the Apple ][ side-scroller...

Re:VisiCalc

[asylumx]

MS Flight Simulator. They've released new versions but everything prior to MS Flight was a wild hit with flight enthusiasts to the point where FSX is still sold now, several years after they stopped working on it.

Re:VisiCalc

[Kiaser Zohsay]

Freecell was a sample application bundled with the ill-fated Win32s subsystem for Windows 3.11. Win32s was intended to be a "subset" of the Win32 API available on the fledgling Windows NT that would allow developer to build a single EXE that could run on both systems. Freecell was included to demonstrate this ability.

The previous paragraph was entirely from memory, but Wikipedia agrees.

Re:VisiCalc

[mariox19]

Just to give some historical perspective—please, indulge a liberal arts major—the invention of the cotton gin is credited as prolonging the institution of slavery in the American South and enabling its expansion into the western territories. The cotton gin allowed farmers to profitably grow shorter staple cotton, which was far more labor intensive to clean by hand. Some historians argue that slavery wouldn't have moved west were it not for the cotton gin, because the land there couldn't support the growing of long staple cotton. It just goes to show that it's difficult to know what the full implications of any invention will be.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

It says EARLY software. I'd say COBOL, assembly, ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC to name a few. Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler the year I was born. In 1952 she had an operational compiler. "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."

Re:VisiCalc

[XxtraLarGe]

Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?

Since nobody's mentioned it: Reversi

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Solitaire was around before Eniac; hell, it was around before utility poles existed. Wikipedia is failing me, but I doubt MS was the first to program it into a computer. And even if so, solitaire is a card game, not a computer game, even if you can play with cards simulated by a computer.

Re:VisiCalc

[tehcyder]

No, the union should have seen to it that their pensions were protected. I mean, if they won't do something that basic, what's the point of having a union? Why was the retirement plan in the hands of management ever? The delivery services union has a cross-company pension so that a driver who moves from FedEx to UPS to DHL has retirement savings regardless.

The union should also have taken over the ownership and management of the company too then. Any "management" decision affects the workers more than anyone, so the union should be in control.

Nice to hear some revolutionary socialist sense being talked on slashdot for once.

Re:VisiCalc

[tehcyder]

The point about pensions, is that there is a vast industry filled with highly paid actuaries who work out all that stuff. People don't just suddenly start living 20 years longer than they were expecting. In the long term, stockmarkets don't devalue by 25%.

All companies (and governments) have to do to ensure that pension obligations are met, is not to promise ridiculous returns and not to fritter away money in the good times, since there will always be bad times.

It's not rocket science.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

VisiCalc was actually credited by a few business journalists in the 80s for starting the whole corporate raider business.

A book on Texaco taking over another oil company states that there were so many takovers of oil companies because it was cheaper to prospect for oil assets on Wall Street where they were cheaper.

Liars' Poker has something similar said in it.

Re:VisiCalc

[operagost]

The pay of Government employees is fixed by the Congress. The people who run the Executive Department of Government as a whole are bound by the law. Every workman has a full opportunity to be heard. They can lay the case before the Congress if any change is contemplated in the law. That is where it is made.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad is still addicted to Jezzball.
He has a stack of papers with each sessions high score for his left and right hand.
We're at 10 years now.

Re:VisiCalc

[rochrist]

It wasn't there. They bought it from Sublogic.

Re:VisiCalc

[rochrist]

Should have said it wasn't THEIRS.

Re:VisiCalc

[Tracebooks]

Very interested as to which institutions define CS as mathematics. I have a 16-year-old son who is heavily into math, especially math theory, but good friends (one a string theory physicist for NASA) tells me for job security he'd be better off in CS, especially Security (the whole issue of the Education Debt Balloon aside). But my son is not totally sold on the idea because he loves the poetry of math theory. A college where it's considered a branch of mathematics sounds like a good bet for him.

Re:VisiCalc

[idontgno]

Fair call. As probably the first popularized 2D cellular automaton, Life broke some ground. And the computerization of the ruleset (pretty much concurrently with the publication of the game in 1970) allowed a lot of research and exploration, and the whole study of cellular automata flourished.

Pretty much the spark that exploded Von Neumann's and Ulam's academic noodling in the 1950s. If we ever get self-replicating nanomachines, some of the credit would have to go to Conway.

Re:VisiCalc

[DaveSewhuk]

My RIT co-op was at Xerox in the late 70's so I have first hand experience with the Alto. It was my personal computer at that time. I would vote Xerox Alto's word processor Bravo. The project manager at PARC, Charles Simonyi, went on to Microsoft to lead in the development of Macintosh Word and Excel. In 1985 Mac Word 1.0 was a pretty good clone of Bravo, right down to the command keys. The PC world would not see this tech until late 1995 when Word 95 was released with Windows 95. Given how many apps read/write/clone Word docs I would say this is the root app for word processing in a WYSWYG world. DOS Word was not even closely related except for the spelling of the program name "Word".

I am ignoring TEX, nroff and other text based apps due to their non-WYSWYG ways.

The Alto has a primitive version of a Draw called SIL. I used it to design circuits in this same period.

Xerox was way ahead on app and computing concepts. BTW, you would print your Bravo documents with a high resolution networked laser printer (384 dpi). Pretty cool stuff for the late 70's. The IBM PC/DOS set the state of the art back at least a decade or more.

Re:VisiCalc

[Jane Q. Public]

"That being said, though, these were all circa 1991. Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure are from 1979 and 1976 respectively."

Yes, but my point was that Zork and Collossal Cave were not graphical. And while it may have had progenitors, Wolfenstein was the one that went on to become a popular hit and re-define the gaming genre.

Re:VisiCalc

[Jane Q. Public]

"As historians we should endeavour to look past our own biases and provide an accurate image of history, not play favourites with specific products."

Except that the question was not about historical ancestry. OP's question was about what was influential, which is (often) a different thing, and at least indirecly implies popularity. For example: much of PARC's work was definitely influential. Hover Tank 3-D was not, particularly.

Re:VisiCalc

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yes. Loose use of the term, vs. the popular FPS - a genre introduced by the iD software game.

I forgot about preventing the write!

Whirrr-ch-thunk!

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it was, I have a copy.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sieve of Erathosthenes counts as an influential early algorithm.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes_sieve

Re:VisiCalc

[demonlapin]

The purpose of unions is to correct an imbalance of power between workers and the owners of capital. The owners of the government are their fellow citizens. Government workers don't work for a corporation whose goal is profit, which is then divided among the owners and the workers according to a plan. They also shouldn't get to strike, because by what right can they deprive their fellow citizens of government services? It's blackmail.

I understand that public sector unions are great for the Democratic Party, but I don't know why that should be a reason to let them exist.

Re:VisiCalc

[demonlapin]

Any "management" decision affects the workers more than anyone

Well, no, not really. Management decisions affect the owners a lot more than the workers, although there are a lot more of the latter.

Nice to hear some revolutionary socialist sense being talked on slashdot for once.

Let me know how that works out for you. The problem with revolutionary socialist states is that they're incredibly prone to capture by vicious assholes with guns.

Re:VisiCalc

[demonlapin]

What on earth are you talking about? The argument is, for me, fairly simple: private sector unions ostensibly correct an imbalance in the relative power of workers and owners. In the case of government, there is no such thing - the owners are your fellow citizens, and you are claiming the right to organize against them (and presumably to stop providing government services if you don't get what you want). Not only that, you can vote for politicians who will promise to raise your pay, etc. That situation is dripping with bad incentives.

I would support public sector unionism only if government employees were forbidden to vote. (And because I do part-time work for the state, I'd be one of them.) You don't get to control both sides of the coin.

Re:VisiCalc

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Really, the local government will be glad to hear about Congress setting the pay of the local firefighters.

Unions do much more than negotiate pay. In fact the most important thing they do is negotiate working conditions. Work hours, vacations, sick time, breaks holidays, etc

Re:VisiCalc

[mattack2]

However: at least in the U.S., computer engineering is definitely NOT a software discipline. It is engineering of the computers themselves, that is to say, hardware (though firmware is involved, naturally).

I don't completely disagree with you, though how much software is involved in a CE degree can vary a lot. I have a CE degree (CIS was the other computer major, and AFAIK, that was a BA), but did mostly software classes, ALONG with hardware. Even the microprocessors class was designing your own CPU in software and simulating it.

Re:VisiCalc

[ananthap]

In India (where I come from), it was indeed wordstar with lotus-123. (Among people like me who have been "around computers" for nearly 4 decades now, it was known that visicalc was the breakthrough spreadsheet. Also that msWord had a lotus-123 compatibility menu option). OK

Re:VisiCalc

[mattack2]

Ummm... Solitaire?

But you're not playing the *same* version, are you?

Since Infocom games are bytecode, you really are running the same version, except (most likely) on a new interpreter.

(You can write your own Z-code games with the Inform compiler, to play on any of the Z-code interpreters that you have.)

Re:VisiCalc

[ananthap]

Further, dBase III followed by FoxPro for DOS. Novell netware (2.2 the peer2peer ie. no dedicated server - and 3.1). Don't know why 3.2 never caught on. OK

Re:VisiCalc

[mattack2]

We should get rid of pensions and have each person have their own 401(k) or similar account.

â¦BUT I think that CURRENT employees should be bound by the pension plan that was in place when they were hired, with voluntary (including via inducements) changing to other later plans.

There are some slimy things going on locally with employees suing to keep the ability to "spike" pension payments. http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_22457589/daniel-borenstein-jerry-brown-kamala-harris-ducking-legal

Re:VisiCalc

[operagost]

I took my quote directly from President Franklin Roosevelt, except for where I changed "we" to "they" for obvious reasons. Even a progressive thinks public unions are a bad idea. Even on a local level, they are.

Re:VisiCalc

[tripleevenfall]

Leisure Suit Larry 1

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl? Seriously? I could have seen C or Pascal as programming languages, or if you wanted to go to shell scripting, perhaps bash (Perl wasn't much more than a lightweight scripting language in its initial release after all)

Lotus 1,2,3 was nothing more than a ripoff of VisiCalc. The only way it was "better" was that it had the support of Lotus, then IBM, behind it.

Re:VisiCalc

[Will.Woodhull]

Perl was the first effective glue language (capable of launching and controlling other apps) on microcomputers. It was also the first full featured language to offer regular expressions, making it possible to mine text reports for data and feed the results into spreadsheets or databases.

C was important, too, but it came from the realm of minicomputers. It was not a product of the microcomputer / personal computer revolution. It preceded that by about 10 years (AIR).

Re:VisiCalc

[Will.Woodhull]

Lotus 1,2,3 was nothing more than a ripoff of VisiCalc. The only way it was "better" was that it had the support of Lotus, then IBM, behind it.

I cannot argue with that, but I do not agree. For one thing, Lotus 1.2.3 was the first major business app to offer a "student version" at an affordable price for students. That had a profound effect on the entire PC ecosystem.

Re:VisiCalc

[Raved Thrad]

I still miss WordPerfect every time I open MS Word.

Re:VisiCalc

[Wolfrider]

--For those that don't already know, the " joe " package for Linux (and FreeBSD) also provides " jstar " - a text editor with Wordstar key bindings. It's near-indispensable for me, as I equate (still) using VIM in 2013 to using EDLIN in modern OS environments. :b There's a better way.

/ shout out to Wordstar fans, yo

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you - as I wrote it.

Re:VisiCalc

[Anonymous Coward]

My college roommate did CS. I did Biology & Psychology with HCI on the side, and I was working on a computer considerably more than he was[1]. In the final year I think he only used it for email. He used to spend all day writing funny squiggles.

Fact is, CS varies a lot between institutions. In some it's very theoretical, in some it's so practical that it's really Software Eng by a different name. And in others it can be either depending on the options you take.

[1] & I don't mean for facebook & shit. I doubt skateboard face was even born then.

What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whining because they don't teach Mac history 101 in CS programs?

I sure bet the grad student heard of MS Windows, Word and Excel. I bet he's even heard of CorelDraw, Super Mario Brothers and Pong too.

Re:What the fuck?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Excel was based on the earlier program Multiplan, which the young company MicroSoft developed for the Apple II.

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet he's even heard of CorelDraw, Super Mario Brothers and Pong too.

Before Doom there was nothing...

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whining because they don't teach Mac history 101 in CS programs?

I sure bet the grad student heard of MS Windows, Word and Excel. I bet he's even heard of CorelDraw, Super Mario Brothers and Pong too.

Excel was based on the earlier program Multiplan, which the young company MicroSoft developed for the Apple II.

Nice way to stick it to him...

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, that's what I came here to say. Mod the man up, chop chop! IDDQD!

Re:What the fuck?

[Samantha Wright]

Wolf 3D, Blake Stone (by a week), ShadowCaster, Catacombs 3D... Close, but no cigar. :)

Re:What the fuck?

[Bing Tsher E]

Apple 2? I had Multiplan on Xenix.

The old Xenix Microsoft produced before the PC. I still have an Altos box that runs it.

Re:What the fuck?

[Drishmung]

And Word for Windows was a backport of Macintosh Word. MS Word for DOS didn't support windows, so when they need a response to WordPerfect, they looked to the Macintosh division for the base code.

PowerPoint was originally a Mac program too.

Re:What the fuck?

[fermion]

Much of what the consumer sees as the modern PC came from Apple or MS working off of the Mac platform. You can argue where the ideas came from, but the implantation that the user is familiar came from Apple. Therefore looking at programs such as MacWrite, MacDraw, Excel, Pagemaker, Overvue, even Foxpro can provide context how applications evolve, become obsolete, get integrated into other application, and more generally adjust to user changing sophistication. In MacWrite the cool thing was to have 20 fonts in one documents. That was all it needed to do to be cool. Many users still function at level of sophistication, but it does not sell software. MacWrite to Pages would be a useful study for anyone who wants to write application software at a high level. The same is true in the contemporary age, where Apple and Google are defining the tradition from WIMP era to the touchscreen era, which resembles the original very simple WIMP interface, not the overly complex monster MS built.

Of course is none of this is what many consider computer science, which has more to do with algorithms and writing more advance compilers which can encapsulate more of the knowledge that has been built up thereby trading very cheap clock cycles for very expensive and unreliable human hours. Human interface design, though, is a valid branch of computer science and a much neglected one given the prevalence of truly awful interfaces forced onto the unsuspecting public. I am looking at you T-Mobile.

I am also aware that number of schools have 'computer science' courses in which they merely teach computer applications. i don't even know how such schools get students, as any decent high school has ample opportunities to learn these applications for free. I suppose the kids just waste all their time on facebook, and then end up paying thousands of dollars later to learn what they could have for free.

Re:What the fuck?

[paimin]

Excel? You mean the application that was first released for Mac?

Idiot.

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I've personally used CorelDraw, I don't think it is known among my recently graduated or close to graduation collegues. Today, CorelDraw is a pretty obscure piece of software (as I understand it, its usage was more common in the past- for example, my dad and granddad used it as a UI around the scanner). Most people just use Inkscape, Illustrator or *shrudder* Visio.

Re:What the fuck?

[mvdwege]

Most of what the consumer sees comes from the 8-bit world of the Apple II and CP/M. That the Mac, and later Windows put a GUI on it is mere refinement, but accessible business computing using spreadsheets and word processors were old hat by that time.

Shorter: get off my lawn.

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a version of Multiplan on a Commodore 64. This thing was everywhere.

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I've never even seen an Apple Square Brackets, and I really don't care what kind of software was available for it.

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Wikipedia article says Multiplan was first developed on CP/M, then ported to a lot of platforms.
I had it on the TI-99/4A; how's that for obscure?

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, Xenix was Microsoft's UNIX operating system, well licensed from AT&T.

I still have a copy of Multiplan on 8" for CP/M.

Re:What the fuck?

[BitterOak]

I had a version of Multiplan on a Commodore 64. This thing was everywhere.

Yeah, but Multiplan on the C64 was useless cause it took so long to open and save spreadsheets.

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, while Xenix predated the Apple ][, Multiplan didn't come out until 1982. It was designed to compete with VisiCalc.

I don't know why you got modded up.

Re:What the fuck?

[mcmaddog]

Except that 2 out of the 3 started as Mac programs first and Windows was based largely on MS experience with Apple's GUI as the largest Mac software developer outside Apple.

Times change

[Hentes]

Why should we waste time and brainpower studying obsolete software?

Re:Times change

[mikael]

Because once we forget how this software worked, someone else comes along and does a research project, thinks that they have invented something new, patents it and/or names it after themselves. Then they'll start sending lawyers after other people. I've seen this happening with something as simple as 3x3 convolution matrices and widget libraries. What was common knowledge in personal computer magazines back in the 1980's now seems to be stuff that leads
to patent battles now.

Re:Times change

[Chuckstar]

Same reason Intro to OS courses often incorporate that version of early AT&T Unix?

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

Why study history at all?

Re:Times change

[Leafheart]

For the same reason we have a Baseball Hall of Fame, a Football hall of fame, or even simpler, for the same reason we study world history. Know thy history, learn from your mistakes, understand what the best things were made off.

Re:Times change

[gbooch]

OMG, please tell me you are not old enough to vote too.

We study influential software for the same reason we study the past in any domain: to learn of the forces that shape what is, the human stories that lead to these artifacts, the design decisions and the lessons learned therein. What you see on your desktop today is the current end of a long chain of "obsolete software" that includes MacPaint, and Whirlwind, and any number of earlier systems that bring us to current dominant designs. Economically significant and useful software intensive systems all have such a legacy, and your hubris in so quickly dismissing the value of understanding anything older than your professional lifetime is staggeringly depressing to me. May you never be on any development team that has to grapple with the refactoring of legacy code.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who forget the crappy software of the past are doomed to repeat it.

Re:Times change

[MightyYar]

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

I like that I'm paraphrasing a historical figure to defend the teaching of a field's history.

Re:Times change

[Holi]

W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washed Warren Wiggins who was washing Waldo Woo. - FTFY

Re:Times change

[Stormwatch]

Understanding what made such software good back then might help you produce better software now. Who knows, maybe studying various ancient, obscure GUIs could have averted disasters like Windows 8, Gnome 3, and Unity.

Re:Times change

[MightyYar]

LOL, you fixed it for Dr. Seuss! I'm not sure if that is bold and confident or heretic...

Re:Times change

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Because once we forget how this software worked, someone else comes along and does a research project, thinks that they have invented something new, patents it and/or names it after themselves.

Historically, that also happened in mathematics. Oh, wait, software IS mathematics. And mathematics just doesn't get obsolete. Just sometimes, notation changes (== programs get reimplemented), but the core is still the same.

Re:Times change

[vlm]

You have not gotten the straight answer yet, but the real world economic answer is nothing changes very much, so a well educated individual knows how the newest PR news release about a "new" idea will turn out, given how the exact same idea turned out three times in 1970, five times in the 80s, and twice in the 90s. Even if the outcome is different for tech or non-tech reasons, the challenges, successes, roadblocks, etc, will be the same this time around as the last ten times.

Ah so you're saying that this new language will be a silver bullet which will eliminate programming as a profession because business people will write their own programs, you say? Hmm I wonder if thats ever been claimed before. Naah. If it were you'd have language names like "Business Oriented Language" and stuff.

I've got a totally new idea! We can project manage programming by programmer-hour because the product of programmer times hour is always a constant a given problem. You'd think someone in 1960's mainframe development would have had the same idea, but people back then were pretty stupid so I'm sure my new idea is ... new.

Hey guys, I got a new one. We could assign a noob to work with an old timer and see if the noob learns anything by osmosis. This has never been tried in all of human history so I'm gonna patent it and trademark it and I'm gonna be rich and buy a private island.

To be honest its not as technical as you'd like to think... its kinda like studying ancient fashion to predict what future fashion will look like, seeing as womens fashion is kinda cyclical. So, you're saying after skirts go down, they tend to go up, and vice versa? Holy cow batman! Especially when dealing with trendy style high fashion like UI design or PR.

Re:Times change

[sjames]

Same reason we bother now to know what Aristotle had to say about physics. His models are all hopelessly out of date now, but the thought process that lead to them and ultimately lead us to discard them is still enlightening.

Re:Times change

[Will.Woodhull]

Roman numerals are obsolete. Unless you live in clockwork world.

More to the point, the mathematical systems based on roman numerals are obsolete, replaced by a system that uses zero as a placeholder and as the common origin of all the number lines. You would have a hard time describing how to do simple things like reconciling your checkbook using only the concepts behind roman numerals.

Re:Times change

[Will.Woodhull]

Why should we waste time and brainpower studying obsolete software?

Because we don't have a fucking clue how game changing events like the way cell phones have impacted everybody's life happen, even though we have been through this a half dozen times since 1980?

Studying how VisiCalc changed accounting, statistics, markets, and the rise of Walmart just might help us figure out how to more smoothly handle the Next Big Thing.

Re:Times change

[Kjella]

You would have a hard time describing how to do simple things like reconciling your checkbook using only the concepts behind roman numerals.

Why, is II + II = IV different in roman numerals? Yes, the calculation would get seriously much more annoying, but the concepts should be just as easy or hard to explain.

Re:Times change

[FrankHS]

Some of us loved that obsolete software.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

MCMXVII * LXIV is quite different in all practical ways. The calculation being more annoying *is* a relevant difference and it does make some concepts easier to explain. For instance, you can much more easily demonstrate riemann sums if it doesn't take a ridiculous amount of effort to calculate rectangular areas.

And anyway, software is mathematics is a statement that is vacuously true, in the same way that a building's engineering blueprints are mathematics.

Re:Times change

[Hentes]

Wrong theories aren't really taught in physics. Neither are they enlightening, in fact it kinda destroys the legend of brilliant minds finding out how nature works, as for most of history, competing theories have covered pretty much every possibility. Now there are theories that were good at the time just simply got outdated, but most of them, including Aristotle were completely wrong. I don't see how his blatant misuse of logic could be of any help.
There's also a big difference between history and computing. Most of the time, new programs improve on older ones their functionality being a superset of their predecessors. Thus, learning how old programs worked would be, for most of the time, redundant.
Time is finite, and you have to make a compromise in what you teach and what you don't. If you want to teach user skills, you won't have enough time even for the most important software that is out there today, it's just too much.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, until a new paradigm like quantum computing becomes dominant, then computing has certainly not changed in the same way. That's why you can still find The Art of Computer Programming on the shelves, and it's why it's still just as useful. Perhaps we should add TeX to the list?

Re:Times change

[Hentes]

That's not a problem, but saying that younger people are dumb for not sharing the author's nostalgia is.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

software is mathematics is a statement that is vacuously true

Unless, you know, you actually study computer science instead of just flapping away at a keyboard.

Re:Times change

[BasilBrush]

That's not a problem, but saying that younger people are dumb for not sharing the author's nostalgia is.

No one said they were dumb, nor that they should be nostalgic. Just that it's a surprising gap in the knowledge of degree level computer engineers/scientists.

Re:Times change

[sjames]

So the 5 elements. phlogiston, and aether are current theories? I learned about them in class. Hoe about the Bohr model of the atom?

All of those were decent in their day, it's just that we learned more and found that they didn't fit anymore.

We're talking about Computer Science here, not trade school.

Re:Times change

[tibit]

Because some of this "obsolete" software is still in use. Maxima, nee Macsyma, for example. The code base, written largely in Lisp, has a bunch of files with original copyright in the late 60s, IIRC.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

WWWWWWWWWWWW: "Wij willen Willem weg, wilde Willem wijzer worden, wij wilden Willem weer." ("We want Willem gone, but if Willem would become wiser we might want him back") - slogan of the Belgian Revolution (1830) against King William I of the Netherlands - unfortunately William did not get any wiser.

Re:Times change

[Will.Woodhull]

Why, is II + II = IV different in roman numerals? Yes, the calculation would get seriously much more annoying, but the concepts should be just as easy or hard to explain.

But you are using the concepts of today's math and simply translating them into roman numeral expressions. The give-away is your use of "+" and "=" symbols.

Think back to kindergarten: count out two popsicle sticks in one pile, then two sticks in another pile. Now put the piles together, and count out the number of sticks to get the answer.

Re:Times change

[Boomerang Fish]

You miss the point. No, we don't teach Aristotle's physical theories in physics classes; that would be counter productive. But we do teach some of his methods, that he was one of the earliest to even HAVE a method that was semi-reigourous and repeatable. He was mentioned in my classes. I learned more about his wrong conclusions in philosophy and logic classes than I did in physics and engineering, but he did come up as a progeniter of methodology even in the physics classes.

--
I drank what?

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

> implying that the Roman Empire didn't have accountants

Re:Times change

[WhatAreYouDoingHere]

Think back to kindergarten: count out two popsicle sticks in one pile, then two sticks in another pile. Now put the piles together, and count out the number of sticks to get the answer.

Interesting... So if one line represents a popsicle stick...
First Pile \ |
Second Pile | /

The piles put together \/||

So, in summary, || + || = \/II

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking about Computer Science here, not trade school.

It shows. We desperately need more trade schools.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

DUMB!

Re:Times change

[sjames]

We probably do. College is too expensive and other than acting as a bullet point for HR, is largely unnecessary for many jobs.

However, for those who ARE studying computer science rather than pursuing a trade education, a historical perspective is valuable.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do a fairly good job of estimating the size of the known universe, though.
http://web.fccj.org/~ethall/archmede/sandreck.htm

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

Darn, site just went down. Just search for 'The Sand Reckoner'.

Re:Times change

[Hanzie]

vlm,

Your comment is nasty, snarky, sarcastic...

And dead on accurate, totally deserving it's (Score:5, Insightful). I tip my hat.

Re:Times change

[julesh]

Because once we forget how this software worked, someone else comes along and does a research project, thinks that they have invented something new, patents it and/or names it after themselves

OK, but what did either of these pieces of software (ie MacWrite and MacPaint) do that hadn't been done before? Their importance, historically speaking, is that they were the first implementations of their kind on the Mac, and therefore were the first to become popular. The key innovations, however (i.e. WYSIWYG document editing and mouse-based bitmap editing) were both made years previously on other platforms.

Re:Times change

[julesh]

TFA asks specifically about MacWrite and MacPaint, both of which are obsolete by any reasonable definition. And neither of which did anything particularly innovative, either. Macsyma, OTOH, was a very innovative piece of software that even today has few competitors. We're talking about the difference between a commercial project to implement already-established concepts on a new platform and an academic project to break new ground and do things that weren't previously possible. It's very hard to compare the two.

Re:Times change

[csrster]

Also Einstein's theory of the anomalous specific heat of metals. Oh how we laughed at that one!

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

Understanding what made such software good back then might help you produce better software now.

(replying as AC to preserve mods/pts)

It seems to me that progress is made by studying what made software not so good back then -- whether in terms of user-experience or limitations -- because that points in directions in which it might be improved. Which is progress.

Re:Times change

[pv2b]

Unless I misunderstood your comment, all you need to "balance your checkbook" are positive numbers (zero not required), addition, subtraction and the concept of equality and comparison. You just keep your income and your spendings on seperate tallies and compare them when you're done. You can handle any cases where "you've spent no money" or "you've received no money" as special cases without having to resort to the concept of zero being a number like any other.

Re:Times change

[pv2b]

You could do MCMXVII * LXIV as a calculation quite similar to 1917 * 64.

Just as:

1917 * 64 = 1000*64 + 900*64 + 10*64 + 7 * 64

in a similar way:

MCMXVII * LXIV = MM * LXIV - C * LXIV + X * LXIV + VII * LXIV

Multiplying by X for example is quite simple, you just transform I->X, V->L, X->C, L->D, C->M etc so X*LXIV (10*64) = DCXL (640). This is as an analogue to tacking a zero on the end. A little more complex, yes, but not fundamentally different.

That said, I like the system we all use today a lot better. :-)

Re:Times change

[mariox19]

It may make no sense to study Aristotle's physics in physics class, but I wouldn't go so far as the guy you're responding to and say there's no reason to bother studying Aristotle's physics. I'm always intrigued that Aristotle explanation for gravity was something along the lines of things "wanting" to return to their "natural" state (or something like that). From a psychological point of view, that kind of anthropomorphization is really intriguing.

It seems like it's easier for human beings to think this way. Just take a look at what a difficult time people have reasoning about evolution and natural selection (and I'm talking about people who don't dispute their validity). It's all "nature wants" and "nature does" this or that—it's all an assumed active voice and teleology. You'd think we might have grasped a distinction like this after 2,400 years.

Re:Times change

[TheLink]

I'm always intrigued that Aristotle explanation for gravity was something along the lines of things "wanting" to return to their "natural" state (or something like that). From a psychological point of view, that kind of anthropomorphization is really intriguing.

Our theory of gravity may be more accurate, but the current _explanation_ for gravity still isn't much of an advance over Aristotle's explanation is it?

Re:Times change

[Will.Woodhull]

Yes, you are describing counting house methods for managing the things we do today with arithmetic. But what you are describing is not an arithmetic operation; you are describing the much older means of tallying and comparing quantities.

Roman numerals are tallies. They represent how many are in a stack, how many stacks of five or ten or one hundred are on the table, and so on. This is not arithmetic where each number is an abstraction built up of the ten memorized basic abstractions of number that are associated with the ten arbitrary glyphs. There is no concept of arithmetic addition in tally systems; instead there is the concept of combining one pile with another. There is no concept of subtraction; instead there is the concept of taking away.

The mathematics behind roman numerals is a much older approach to number theory and much more limited than the arithmetic we use.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

And studying these programs in CS is like studying the baseball hall of fame in a Physics course. What is there to learn in the context of CS?

Re:Times change

[Tracebooks]

If, after all the explanations that have been given to you as to why it's important to know the past of a given field, you still say it's just "nostalgia", then I don't know if there's much hope for your development. Teachability is one of the prime characteristics of successful people. I should think that not wanting to fall into the pitfalls of things that have been tried before, or figuring out why they failed so your efforts don't duplicate those reasons, would be good enough reason to know about the past of CS, including some of these old programs.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

And discounting the study of history as simple nostalgia is also dumb.

Re:Times change

[mariox19]

Ha! I get what you're saying. But I only mean to point out what his theory suggests about human psychology and cognition. People find it difficult—or at least awkward—to conceive of action without there being an actor. It seems this preconception is more or less hardwired, a cognitive bias of sorts.

Re:Times change

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Roman numerals are obsolete. Unless you live in clockwork world. More to the point, the mathematical systems based on roman numerals are obsolete, replaced by a system that uses zero as a placeholder and as the common origin of all the number lines.

I would have thought that "just sometimes, notation changes" covered that for people with actual reading comprehension? More to the point, Roman numerals were perfectly fine for their age and purpose.

Re:Times change

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Romans did virtually all their calculations (beyond simple ones like 2+3) on their abaci (Taisbak, C. M., 1965: Roman numerals and the abacus. Classica et Mediaevialia 26) and the numerals were only used for writing the results out. I guess you'd call them a serialization format. If you were a Roman, you wouldn't count using the written numerals (*). If you ever find a book which demonstrates the difficulty of doing calculations (a bit of trivia: calculi were the little stones on the abacus board, hence our word 'calculations') with Roman numerals by writing two numbers with Roman numerals on top of each other in a positional-like fashion, you know the author hadn't done his homework before writing the book.

(*) (not to mention the fact that they changed substantially during the centuries between the Archaic Roman period and the end of the Empire, most people today don't even know many of the Roman numerals, such as |)) for five thousand (a shape approximation, blame Slashdot for lack of Unicode) or \|/ for fifty before L came into use, or (|) for a thousand before M came into use (which isn't even Roman, it's medieval!)).

Re:Times change

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Romans did virtually all their calculations (beyond simple ones like 2+3) on their abaci [wikipedia.org] (Taisbak, C. M., 1965: Roman numerals and the abacus. Classica et Mediaevialia 26) and the numerals were only used for writing the results out. I guess you'd call them a serialization format. If you were a Roman, you wouldn't count using the written numerals (*). If you ever find a book which demonstrates the difficulty of doing calculations (a bit of trivia: calculi were the little stones on the abacus board, hence our word 'calculations') with Roman numerals by writing two numbers with Roman numerals on top of each other in a positional-like fashion, you know the author hadn't done his homework before writing the book.

(*) (not to mention the fact that they changed substantially during the centuries between the Archaic Roman period and the end of the Empire, most people today don't even know many of the Roman numerals, such as |)) for five thousand (a shape approximation, blame Slashdot for lack of Unicode) or \|/ for fifty before L came into use, or (|) for a thousand before M came into use (which isn't even Roman, it's medieval!)).

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

If you post comments only to those on slashdot with good reading comprehension, you are addressing only a subset of the audience. Also, sensible commentary gathers no karma.

The game, really, is to post comments that straddle the boundaries of what most slashdotters think is reasonable. It is a matter of creating a cognitive dissonance. When done with elegance, responses show that the minds of the responders have been cracked open and expanded a little bit, and they now have some new point of view of reality. Other times the responses just show a lot of frustrated anger because, well, being required to think is a bitch, it is hard work, and we hates it, yes we does.

Either way, if you can phrase your post such that it straddles the boundaries of what some slashdotters think is reasonable, the responses will be entertaining.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

So is mistaking experience for nostagia.

Re:Times change

[Anonymous Coward]

You've confused computation with mathematics. Roman numerals suck for doing computations. Mathematics usually avoids any numerals at all, often using set theory as its foundation. When numerals do come up in mathematics, they are mostly constants, so no computation needs with them. For example, Fermat's last theorem:

a^n + b^n = c^n, n > 2

In cases like this, it doesn't matter much if you use 2 or II.

Re:Times change

[Will.Woodhull]

You've confused computation with mathematics.

Actually, I am trying to point out the differences between arithmetic computation and an older form of computation, tallying. (Is there a better term for the generalization of "tally"?).

Roman numerals were an advanced form of recording tallies, that would allow persons experienced in their use to rapidly combine two tallies (the arithmetic equivalent is addition) or take one tally away from another (arithmetic equivalent is subtraction). With practice, simple problems are not hard to do:

How many sheep do John and Mary have together, if John has XXIII and Mary has XIX?

1. Convert XIX from its shortened form to the equivalent long form: XVIIII

2. Scratch each group of five I in XXIII and XVIIII, and substitute a V for that group: XX XVII V

3. Scratch each pair of V and substitute an X for that group: XX XII X

4. Rewrite the result in descending group order: XXXXII

Computation by tally operations is complete. No arithmetic operations used, strictly counting.

I would expect that both methods of computation fit under the broad definition of mathematics.

Re:Times change

[TheLink]

OK we're making some steps - higgs boson and all that.

But one day it may turn out that the best short explanation is some particles just want to be closer together ;).

Electric Pencil

[steelscalp]

So much better than TECO.

McPaint source code

[gbooch]

BTW, the source for MacPaint is available online at the Computer History Museum:

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/

Re:McPaint source code

[niff]

Both written in Pascal, with some Assembler. It's still quite readable for software from that time.

Re:McPaint source code

[anyanka]

Hmm, still haven't found a good replacement for Deluxe Paint.

Re:McPaint source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, still haven't found a good replacement for Deluxe Paint.

grafx2?

The original Lotus 123

[MpVpRb]

Written by one guy..in assembly

Re:The original Lotus 123

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

There's an interesting article about Lotus 1-2-3 with Mitch Kapor on The Register.

Re:The original Lotus 123

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Visicalc. The grandfather to all of them; SuperCalc, Lotus and Excel. I'd mention Appleworks, but that stuff sucked really badly.

Re:The original Lotus 123

[Anonymous Coward]

On NeXTstep, I really liked Lotus Improv. Anybody remember that one?

Re:The original Lotus 123

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that explains a lot.

Re:The original Lotus 123

[DriveDog]

As far as widely-used, 1-2-3 versions 1a and 2. Nothing since has been as quick to use or come nearly as close to being bug-free. Now most accept occasional bugs as normal, but that wasn't the case with 1-2-3. I never used Javelin, but I'd heard that Improv was similar, and if so, Javelin must have been pretty good. Whatever, but Improv should have been the future of "spreadsheets". Instead, we're stuck with Excel, which can do a lot of things but is totally lacking in conceptual integrity. Improv was released too late for the PC and Lotus wouldn't push it for fear of cannabilizing PC 1-2-3 sales. We see where that went. Too bad.

I nominate Visio. MS hasn't totally fubared it (yet). Perhaps it stole from others, I don't know, but it's the first graphical diagramming tool I saw that was fairly intuitive to use. In the negative category, I nominate MS Project. Nothing I've used has been more annoying, even Stanford Graphics, which offered a lot and was intuitive to use but crashed every 5 minutes.

Maybe somebody's mentioned Harvard Graphics, but I haven't noticed. I liked Freelance better but have yet to see a presentation graphics application that I'd give an award. Except for PowerPoint. I'll give it several awards, all negative. I just can't decide on the order.

Re:The original Lotus 123

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. There was also Quantrix, which was a Improv clone. And it still exists today, as a Java application.

If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'd say HyperCard would be a better choice

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[DavidClarkeHR]

I'd say HyperCard would be a better choice

Maybe I'm being sentimental, but hypercard had a HUGE impact on my understanding of the possibilities related to computers.

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[poena.dare]

I was deep into Pascal and assembly but it wasn't until HC that I learned the UI was where the battle was won or lost.

Also, Talking Moose!

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[the eric conspiracy]

It was so groundbreaking that Apple got a patent infringement suit from it.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/20/business/apple-is-said-to-settle-suit.html

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[joeaguy]

Hypercard yes! It was a simple tool that lets lots of people make useful little apps and games quickly, and you can get it do some rather complex things with some effort and creativity.

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[Teancum]

Apple successfully marketed Hypercard, thus changed the world. Your lawsuit reference here just shows how lame software patents really are and why they shouldn't exist.

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[Nerdfest]

So in this case, save Apple's part for a discussion about influential marketing.

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[the eric conspiracy]

It can be argued this is a case of big old mean Apple just blatantly ripping off a one man company by copying his idea, which they were shown under an NDA which they cheerfully broke.

http://www.pandab.org/an-absurd-patent.html

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[Teancum]

In other words, ordinary trade secret laws would have been sufficient to "stick it to the man" and to reign in Apple Computer instead of having to invoke a patent. This poor "inventor" was taken advantage of by the patent system. Just ask Nikola Tesla and Philo Farnsworth how well patents seem to help out small time inventors who make really amazing things.

I do feel for this guy, and he very well may have come up with some amazing ideas before others started to use them, and there should be some way to compensate innovators like this. The patent system simply isn't that compensation method though.

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[BasilBrush]

But I guess the real qualification for it being influential software was that it was an inspiration for the world wide web.

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[shmlco]

Paul Heckel was always a bit of a jerk, and the Zoomracks patent basically covered the concept of displaying a bunch of index cards such that the title of each card was visible and could be selected. In short, no relation to HyperCard, other than they both had cards and fields in which you could type data. Nor did Zoomracks have the equivalent of HyperTalk, which is what gave HyperCard its immense power and success.

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[julesh]

In other words, ordinary trade secret laws would have been sufficient to "stick it to the man" and to reign in Apple Computer instead of having to invoke a patent.

Trade secret laws are notoriously difficult to enforce, though. The problem is that there is nothing to prevent a would-be infringer simply claiming that they had the same idea prior to being exposed to the plaintiff's implementation of it. The plaintiff would then have to prove (on balance of probability) that they did not have the same idea, which is a very hard thing to do in most cases.

Re:If you want groundbreaking early Mac software

[Teancum]

That is equally difficult to prove even in patent infringement cases as to who had the idea first. Now that the USPTO has screwed even that up by moving to a "first to file" instead of a "first to invent" system, such things are going to happen even more. Even that doesn't stop simultaneous filings, other than perhaps looking strictly at the serial number of the application even if the difference is just a matter of a millisecond.

The point here in this particular case was that Apple Computer signed an NDA and openly admitted to viewing the "trade secret" and furthermore implementing the ideas they gleaned from this innovator. That puts it squarely into the realm of a violation of trade secrets and should have been the legal approach, or at least would have been the proper protection had the patent not been available. Indeed the patent sort of muddies up the water quite a bit because the patent acknowledges that the information about the patented idea was in the "public domain" by virtue of the patent application itself.

As can be seen, I hate patents in general and software patents in particular. I have come up with patentable software ideas in the past, and they have done both me and my employers quite well. I can come up with dozens of such ideas, so I don't have any skin off my nose if somebody else in the same situation comes up with the same idea. I just resent the fact that I can't use my idea without litigation afterward because they went through the effort to file the bloody patent.

Computers for everyone!

[Anonymous Coward]

Atari Basic and Atari Editor/Assembler on a 16 kilobyte Atari 800 with a tape drive.

Re:Computers for everyone!

[Anonymous Coward]

Atari Paint and the graphics touch tablet. Very simple principle - any point pressed would change the value of the paddle controller to that point for X and Y.
There was also the light pen from Silica Shop which worked on the same encoding principle.

Re:Computers for everyone!

[Jiro]

The problem with picking Atari Paint and similar programs is that they were only "influential" because given the limited amount of software developers and the fact that as a first party program it was widely available, it was the only choice for a lot of people. There was nothing special about it except for what platform it happened to run on and who made it; it wasn't important to the larger computing populace. Nobody ever bought the system for Atari Paint, said "I wish we could have a program for my computer like Atari Paint", ripped off Atari Paint's new features, etc.

The Atari didn't really have innovative software. It had innovative hardware, and then software which used the hardware in a predictable manner.

Heck...

[Shoten]

...they should study things that are currently in use, too. I had a whip-smart friend who was a grad student at UMass Amherst in 2002. I described an approach to enterprise security monitoring that used relationship modeling so that you'd notice when a certain type of machine started interacting with systems that weren't really in its normal sphere of interaction. The approach I had in mind would use extensions to Active Directory. His first question: "What's Active Directory?" Again, this was in 2002.

Re:Heck...

[Anonymous Coward]

Active Directory was only a few years old in 2002. It came out with Windows 2000.

Re:Heck...

[Shoten]

Yes, and already it was being used widely in enterprise organizations. It was even more highly anticipated than NDS was under Novell 4.x, and companies jumped all over it because companies of medium size or larger were already struggling with using NT's domain architecture or jumping ship from Novell and going straight from NDS to AD. And again, this was a grad...not undergrad, a guy almost done with an MS in Computer Science...student, at a prestigious university. I wouldn't expect him to have been an MCSE capable of designing an AD forest that takes into account proper replication strategies over WAN links of different sorts, but he had never even heard the phrase "Active Directory" before. He was going to leave college to go work in the real world without knowing the first thing about something he was going to see in any enterprise environment. And that's just one of the many things that you'd encounter in many IT organizations that he didn't know anything about, it turned out.

Re:Heck...

[mypalmike]

I guess he skipped the all-important course, "Microsoft Products 637 : Advanced graduate studies in administering servers via dialog boxes."

Re:Heck...

[cryptizard]

Especially in grad school, CS does not have to be about anything remotely practical or even involving computers at all. Many professors in my department cannot program anything more complex than hello world and would not know active directory from their my documents directory, but they are pioneers in cryptography, complexity theory and graph theory (notice the "theory").

For mechanical engineers/designers

[BoRegardless]

Autocad & PowerDraw (now PowerCADD) 2D CAD followed a decade later by SolidWorks 3D for turning concepts into executable designs that were within the realm of price and usability for individual designers.

Re:For mechanical engineers/designers

[DavidClarkeHR]

Autocad & PowerDraw (now PowerCADD) 2D CAD followed a decade later by SolidWorks 3D for turning concepts into executable designs that were within the realm of price and usability for individual designers.

Yes, 3d studio max had a huge impact on animation. Thank all-things-CAD.

Re:For mechanical engineers/designers

[Anonymous Coward]

3DSMAX's impact came from its non-destructive, procedural modifier based approach. By the time it was released, 3D Studio (and several other high end 3D animation packages) had already been out for years.

3D Studio, BTW, is a direct descendant (same authors) from Antic's CAD-3D (the modelling / rendering module of Cyber Studio).

Re:For mechanical engineers/designers

[Anonymous Coward]

Patrick Hanratty wrote the foundational code for mechanical CAD based on 4x4 transforms. A Frenchman named de Castlejau invented Bezier splines (why they weren't named after de Castlejau is an interesting piece of tech history), which were later extended to b-splines by Richard Riesenfeld at the University of Utah, and others. These two achievements were used by everyone who followed. Autocad and Solidworks weren't really "early" in the context of CAD software, although I suppose they were looking back from 2013.

Re:For mechanical engineers/designers

[unixisc]

How was Pro-Engineer?

Influential?

[the eric conspiracy]

dBase
Word Star
Turbo Pascal

Re:Influential?

[jpiratefish]

Turbo Pascal changed *everything* It turned Mr. Borland into a millionaire overnight, and completely changed how software is marketed, and changed the way software is developed forever.

Re:Influential?

[Spectre]

Turbo Pascal, the early versions before version 4, rocked the do a lot with a little.

Less than 40K of floppy disk space got you a text editor and a compiler/linker.

I still keep a copy around, although it doesn't see use but about once a year just for kicks.

Re:Influential?

[Anonymous Coward]

Multics. Computer as utility == The Cloud. Better security (with hardware support) than anything since.

One could write, compile and link a PL/1 program, execute up to a call to a missing procedure, suspend execution, bring up text editor, write procedure, compile, re-link and RESUME execution.

There is a lot to learn from Multics. Unix was named in reference to Multics, and was meant to run on wee computers after Bell Labs and others left the Multics consortium.

Re:Influential?

[Bing Tsher E]

I sysoped a WWIV bbs for quite a while. The version I ran (3.2.1) was only distrubuted as Turbo Pascal 3.0 suorce code.

Re:Influential?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kedit, the PC version of the old mainframe XEDIT. What an improvement over Edlin!

Re:Influential?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rising Star Industries Valdocs on CP/M in 1983 & Forefront/Ashton Tate Framework on MS-DOS in 1984: the first "office suits".

Framework still exists.

Re:Influential?

[seven of five]

It turned Mr. Borland into a millionaire overnight,

I think the name you're looking for is Phillipe Kahn.

Re:Influential?

[flyingfsck]

Specifically dBase II. There never was a dBase I, since base I numerals are rather useless.

Re:Influential?

[julesh]

Turbo Pascal, the early versions before version 4, rocked the do a lot with a little.

Less than 40K of floppy disk space got you a text editor and a compiler/linker.

I still keep a copy around, although it doesn't see use but about once a year just for kicks.

Really? I have version 7 and it doesn't work at all any more -- there's a timing loop calibrated during startup that results in a division by zero on modern processors.

Re:Influential?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the name you're looking for is Phillipe Kahn.

Not quite. It's "Philippe Kahn".

Re:Influential?

[bad-badtz-maru]

There's a patch for that problem somewhere, I saw it many years back when the issue first cropped up.

Re:Influential?

[unixisc]

I recall using dBase IV before it had the ability of generating executables from the DOS prompt - I believe they had that ability starting in dBase V. Had they done that earlier, Ashton Tate might have been more successful.

Visicalc

[Zadaz]

VisiCalc was the first application that made a serious case for general business use. It sold more computers to more businesses than anything.

(See also: Lotus 1-2-3 and Appleworks.)

A few that have grown awful over the years...

[stewbacca]

Here are a few that were great in the beginning but have become bloated and kind of overbearing since:

Word 4.0 for Mac (fast, stable, good UI, nearly perfect)
Photoshop 1.0 and then 3.0 (when they added layers)
Early versions of Excel (for Mac, then later Win95)
FreeHand (when it was Aldus)
PageMaker (when it was Aldus...see a pattern here?)
Aldus Persuasion (notice I didn't say PowerPoint?)
iMovie (compare to any version of movie editing software bundled with Windows ever...no contest)
Honorable Mention: Garage Band (too niche to be mainstream)

Re:A few that have grown awful over the years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't ask me how, but I get this strange feeling you're a fan of software that works on Macs properly.

Re:A few that have grown awful over the years...

[stewbacca]

I'm a fan of software that works on PCs properly as well. But in the design field, those are few and far between. Like I inferred, I don't like much of ANY new software, and I got my start back in the late 80s on Macs, so my "influential" list is probably different than Visual Basic guy.

Re:A few that have grown awful over the years...

[AmiMoJo]

Speaking of Photoshop I'm surprised no-one has mentioned DPaint yet. It was by far the best bitmap graphics editor ever made and was still in use well into the late 90s and early 2000s.

Re:A few that have grown awful over the years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that Garage Band was basically EMagic's MicroLogic. Apple bought EMagic and made Logic Mac-only, and then shortly after released Garage Band as their new entry level audio software. They kept the pro features in the Logic software, but basically said 'screw you' to EMagic's PC customers.... Although I do believe the PC version of (Micro?)Logic may have gotten absorbed into Magix Music Studio. Having used both pieces of software they seemed almost identical, bugs and all.

Re:A few that have grown awful over the years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pagemaker was a joke when compared to QuarkXpress at the time (I'm talking mid to late 90's) when I used to work in the Pre-press industry.

I remember trying to set up a 500 page 'parts' manual in Pagemaker that was like pulling teeth. With quark the ease of step and repeat and exact placing of 'frames' on the page was something that was not easily done with pagemaker (Pagemakler what the design students were taught at college so all they knew when they came to work in teh studio - I was shown Quark when I did a few free weekend's work experience and never looked back - 4 col process at the time was also pretty piss poor in Pagemaker compared to Quark.

Aldus Freehand now, that was a nice tool compared to Illustrator - I stuck with FH zealously in our Studio until there were so many freelance 'designers' who only used Illustrator that I had to stop our corp license - but I always kept a single user license ('just in case' and for any off-the-street people that bought in their disks with freehand files on them).

Re:A few that have grown awful over the years...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would also add PowerPoint and Filemaker (created by Nashoba Systems and marketed by Forethought, see http://www.dancing-data.com/filemakerhist.html) and PowerPoint 1.0 (originally created by Forethought and later bought, and subsequently butchered, by Microsoft, http://www.robertgaskins.com/#powerpoint-history).

Pong

[Anonymous Coward]

.... probably the most influential product ever created ... It showed that a computer could be used for more than just number-crunching, and it used graphics instead of lines of text and numbers

Re:Pong

[Anonymous Coward]

Space War
Maze War (earliest version defeated a patent on networked 3D maze games)

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze-war/index.html

Re:Pong

[Osgeld]

pong was pure hardware

PCPaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't Wolfgram showing off PCPaint like a year before there was any public showing of MacPaint?

Re:PCPaint?

[wavedeform]

No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCPaint

3D Monster Maze.

[RDW]

An FPS without any S (or colour, or sound, or high resolution graphics):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKvd0zPfBE4

Armed with the awesome power of a Sinclair ZX81 and its 16k external RAM pack, you could run around a maze, chased by a dinosaur. In 3D!

Re:3D Monster Maze.

[BasilBrush]

It was just Hunt The Wumpus 3D.

Lets create a list ...

[dgharmon]

Borland Sidekick
dBase
Word Star
Turbo Pascal

Re:Lets create a list ...

[mikael]

Crosstalk (the pricy RS-232 comms package)
Kermit (the open-source RS-232 and later network comms package)
Fastback (PC backup utility)
Norton disk explorer (disk drive maintainance)
Brief (another PC editor)
GED (another PC editor)
Fract386 (fractal explorer)
PHIGS (early 3D CAD library)
SRGP (Simple Raster Graphics Package)

Re:Lets create a list ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not even sure I am spelling this correctly anymore, but back in my early days, what changed computers from a toy to a real machine for me was "Telix" (sp??). A MS Dos3 modem terminal software I ran on my IBM XT 4.77mhz with CGA monitor (paid entra for that 4 colour screen) and began a life of BBSing that forced me to buy a new modem every 2-4 years (at hundreds of dollars each time): 300baud($300), 1200baud($400), 2400baud($500), 9600baud (hayes) ($500), 14400 (USrobotics)($250), 57600 (no-name brand)($200), and then to a cable internet connection in 1996 :)
   

Re:Lets create a list ...

[gmuslera]

dbase, wordstar, turbo pascal, etc If well all were "normal" apps, pretty much groundbreaking each one, but normal (btw would add pkarc to that collection),

Sidekick was something different, in a single tasking OS you could had a hint of what was mean to run more than a program at once, in a non intrusive way, something surprising back at that time, at least for me.

Re:Lets create a list ...

[WhatAreYouDoingHere]

XTree

Pagemaker, Photoshop, Illustrator...

[fustakrakich]

Made the Mac famous

important bits

[Mendenhall]

Algol-60. RT-11. TECO. Hypercard (count this one twice!).

Re:important bits

[vlm]

MVS/MVT with a mandatory reading of Brook's book about software development.

Re:important bits

[yoyomama]

Ah TECO. My fingers still remember. On ms-dos, how about DeSmet C and the SEE editor and the book Software Tools? A c compiler, an editor (with source), enough tools to start a career.

Re:important bits

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to forget Dartmouth's contribution: the Beginner's Algebraic Symbolic Instruction Compiler and its 16 keywords...

Re:important bits

[Lawrence_Bird]

Ha... I missed your post and mentioned TECO on its own further down... TECO really should be in the hall of fame.

And Algol.. I'm still a FORTRAN guy but one must respect Algol for granddaddying C and others.

Re:important bits

[Anonymous Coward]

Dijkstra's ALGOL60 compiler effectively gave us recursion.
(see The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra)

Re:important bits

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, RT-11 made a pretty decent single user PC back in the 1970's. With tons of free software available through the Decus library. Teco and Runoff made for a fairly usable word processing and development environment -- and a couple of spreadsheet products. Trouble with a lot of this discussion is the bland assertion that before the PC and Mac there was nothing. Truth is that prior to the adaptation of the 8008 to personal computers there was a lot of personal computing around -- just gets overlooked by the fanboys. Not everything was punch cards or paper tape or building size mainframes.

Susan Kare

[Amorymeltzer]

He mentions Susan Kare but I'd like to give another shout out to her work. We are still using derivatives of her designs, and the brief simplicity of them really led the way for a lot of the icons we use now.

Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[sideslash]

"Why aren't you one, too?"

OK, maybe that's a little harsh. But it's not completely apparent what value such a detailed review of early software programs would add to a computer science curriculum. It's probably sufficient to note the emergence of the GUI as the major defining element here, and let our poor undergrads get back to studying their bi-directional linked lists.

My opinion: it's not an accident that computer science is a more forward-looking than backward-looking discipline. Students will get more mileage out of downloading the latest version of OpenCV or playing with math in Python than sitting through a boring lecture about primitive computer software apps.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[Anonymous Coward]

deluxe paint was better anyway.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[DNS-and-BIND]

Learning history does have its advantages. "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." Same principle applies to other software.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[vlm]

boring lecture about primitive computer software apps.

Ah see thats the wrong way to teach it. Kind of the "high school world history" model. "OK now kids remember the number 1492 will be on your NCLB test not 1491 or 1493..."

The right way is to talk about it is the "university world history" model. Talk about large scale, sequence is more important than date memorization, cause and effect, etc.

For example you give a lecture on how processing power has fluctuated from central big computers, to distributed, to end user thick clients and back again over and over for decades. And its effect on the UI, latency, bandwidth..

A very CS algorithm history lesson would be lets just talk about sorting algos over the decades... its been a long time since bubble sort was king of the hill but you'll still see noobs trying to re-implement the wheel...

Its definitely NOT the type of thing you'd train code monkeys, but is pretty important to educate a computer scientist or "real" programmer.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. DPaint! DPaint! DPaint!

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[jhecht]

The Mac OS's successful commercialization of the GUI was a huge advance, and students really need to compare it to CP/M and the like to understand its importance. You don't need a detailed comparison, just test runs of the two side by side to show the difference in user experience. Late in 1983, I walked into a computer store fully intending to buy a CP/M machine, fiddled with the interface for about a half hour, and walked out without buying one. It simply was not worth it, even as a technology writer. I'm a fast typist, the three-finger command interface was too clumsy, and nobody wanted -- or even knew how to handle -- electronic submissions. The late Cary Lu introduced me to the Mac, in 1984, but what sold me was watching my six-year-old daughter play with one in the Boston Computer Museum. She picked up the interface in minutes for MacPaint. MacPaint and file management were similarly intuitive. I wanted a tool for writing, not to be a computer operator. I bought a Mac and got it up and running right out of the box.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[BasilBrush]

This is a list of influential programs, not programs that were written as the next step on from those influential programs.

For the same reason, VisiCalc should be here, but not Lotus 1.2.3 or Excel.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[SlideRuleGuy]

It's not an accident that "computer science" looks forward. It's because people like to program, and a significant part of the enjoyment of programming is doing everything from scratch. I've met people who will turn their noses up at existing code in favor of writing everything from scratch, because "that's where the fun is".

So yes, we too hate studying the history of old applications because then we'd be forced to admit that it has been done before, and probably better than we could have done it. And then where would the fun be?

NIH ("not invented here") is a huge part of why software engineering is still stuck in the cottage industry stage...

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Maybe they should honor Xerox Star

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[sideslash]

NIH ("not invented here") is a huge part of why software engineering is still stuck in the cottage industry stage...

NIH can indeed be a mistake of many programming shops when approaching an individual problem, but on the other hand, I question the existence of any serious programmers who don't use existing frameworks and libraries (Boost, Java, .NET, etc.). In fact, compared to the early 80's, I'd say software engineering as an industry is doing excellently well at code re-use. And in fact in my OP, I suggested that students would do well to play with things like OpenCV and Python math libraries, which are both great examples of code re-use. Maybe you can be more specific?

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[Anonymous Coward]

if you expected to be able to use cp/m without a manual within half an hour, or even get an idea how it works, your expectations need readjustment.

also, if learning to use a computer via cp/m, dos, basic, or whatever is daunting for you, i'd rather not see what you are writing.

  a car analogy seems fitting here.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[foniksonik]

Most developers are not reinventing however. Most are writing glue code and business rules. All the hard bits are prior art. Every once in a while some clever fellow will look at it all and have a eureka moment (this will be so much faster if...) - he's the one who needs to revisit history. If it looks revolutionary, it's probably been thought of before. If its evolutionary then there's no point looking as the context is the important bit (the business rules).

So yeah CS academics should look back as often as they look forward but programmers should probably just be looking at what's directly around them, get to far ahead and you'll break the build at the wrong time - or spend all year trying to regain your performance profile after refactoring the code to be modular (not necessarily bad, just be sure you've got some political capital to use up).

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[Anonymous Coward]

Another fitting quote is "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

If Dave had heard that one, he'd've been less surprised.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[Anonymous Coward]

But there's a massive difference between learning about operating system architecture (Unix) than there is learning about primitive paint/word processing programs.

Seriously I can think of absolutely zero value in learning about MacPaint, I mean what would the value be? Human knowledge on just about everything surrounding it has improved since then, so why teach stupid outdated understanding of things?

The UI is obsolete, the technologies for developing that sort of application are obsolete, the feature set is obsolete, there's literally nothing there of value to learn about it other than history for history's sake.

A good test for "Is it worth teaching about in CS classes?" would be, is it still relevant in the modern world, Unix is, MacPaint isn't, not even close to relevant. If you really want students to learn about paint programs at very least use the source from something like Paint.NET which is more modern and still has relevance in today's world in terms of features, technology, code design and so forth.

I think those complaining about the summary aren't complaining because they don't get that history is useful sometimes, but that not all history is useful. It's useful for me to know about how the guy who mapped the spread of plague in London figured it out by mapping affected houses to find the source in an effort to control the disease, but I really couldn't care what he had for lunch on Christmas day that year, it's of literally no value or worth and no history teacher would waste time teaching it. MacPaint is that guy's lunch.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that the Mac brought to the table was interface consistency. Programs written for Ms-Dos and the Mac all had a common set of basic features such as open a file, copy something, paste it, etc. The Mac's strength was that Apple was telling developers to do those kind of things a certain way so that when a new user came to your program, they didn't have to re-learn the basic stuff in your program as they already knew how to do it from some other Mac program.

It took ages for Microsoft to see the importance of that simple idea. Unfortunately, you now go to a Mac or an iPhone and each program seems to have a slightly different way of doing simple things.

Re:Article summary: "I am a Mac fanboi"

[tilante]

The Xerox Star interface really was much, much more primitive than the Mac interface, though. Drag-and-drop? Xerox didn't have it. The clipboard? Xerox didn't have it. Drop-down menus? Ditto. Resource forks to make internationalization easy? Ditto. Type and creator information stored for files? Direct manipulation to edit file names? Self-repainting windows? Programs being able to draw into obscured portions of windows? Progress dialogs? Confirmation boxes? Tool palettes? Keyboard shortcuts?

The Xerox Star interface had none of those. The first version of the Mac interface did. (Some of them were invented first for the Lisa, then brought over to the Mac, and some had been invented before at other places. As far as I know, though, the creation of them at Apple was a re-invention from scratch. They didn't know other people had already invented them.)

Where the Star did shine was in its internals. It had multitasking and memory protection, which the original MacOS didn't, and used the Mesa programming language, which had many advanced features for the time (modular programming, exception handling, and threading, for example). A large part of that, though, was due to the system constraints - the first Macs only had 128K of RAM, 64K of ROM, a single floppy drive, and a 7.8 MHz processor. The Star, in contrast, had a minimum of 384K of RAM (expandable to 1.5M), a hard drive of at least 10M, and a CPU that performed about the same as a VAX minicomputer did at the time. Of course, it also cost $16,000, versus the $2,500 of the original Mac. (An average secretary made $12,000 a year at the time.)

Split Decision

[jasnw]

Either "Hunt the Wumpus" or Basic.

Re:Split Decision

[Teancum]

Dartmouth BASIC (all capital letters, as it is an acronym) is arguably much more influential than Wumpus, but both do deserve some kudos.

Re:Split Decision

[alphatel]

+1 Wumpus

Re:Split Decision

[Shaman]

I came here to say this.

Software was written before 1980...

[JohnWiney]

Watfor/Watfiv. QED and its predecessors. TRofff/Nroff and their predecessors. And lots more.

Second for PageMaker

[Nova Express]

Without the desktop publishing revolution, it's hard to see Apple surviving long enough for Jobs to retake the helm.

Re:Second for PageMaker

[BasilBrush]

You say that as if it was lucky. In reality the Mac had impressive for it's day typography, which was a result of Jobs pre-Apple interest in typography, and his desire to bring it to computers. The machine was essentially made for dtp, before desktop publishing was even a phrase.

Apple survived over the lean period because of Jobs vision, not as an accident.

The original UNIX source code

[kthreadd]

http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl

Re:The original UNIX source code

[udin]

Even more so because AT&T decided to market licenses for Unix instead of just distributing, pissing off Stallman, who went and started the Free Software Movement in response.

Re:The original UNIX source code

[Stormwatch]

Stallman mentions a Xerox printer, not Unix.

The original MacOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Or rather, System Software - and not for its under the hood tricks but the GUI. The influence of that system is still with us today. It's a cliché, but it's an inflection point that I believe CS majors should at least be knowledgeable about.

Quake I

[YrWrstNtmr]

Used for network testing in many small to medium size businesses.
And Friday afternoon stress relief.

Re:Quake I

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know which is worse - that you missed Doom in precisely the same role, or that you think that Quake qualifies as early software!

Re:Quake I

[Anonymous Coward]

Used for network testing in many small to medium size businesses.
And Friday afternoon stress relief.

Snipes - http://www.textmodegames.com/download/snipes.html

Novell used to ship this as a standard part of their networking kit back in the 80s

Studying obsolete software?

[dgharmon]

> Why should we waste time and brainpower studying obsolete software?

You'd be surprised hos so little has changed, yea you get 3d fluttering window effects, but the underling usability of the software hasn't improved by much, you still have to tell it what to do ...

Re:Studying obsolete software?

[sphealey]

Particularly true in the ERP world - 80% of the midrange products out there (and at least one of the big boys) simply took their data structures from ASK MANMAN.

sPh

How could they usefully study such software...

[John Hasler]

...when the source is unavailable? I can see that these programs might be mentioned as examples of early efforts in a course on UI design, but what else is there to say about them?

Re:How could they usefully study such software...

[kthreadd]

At least the source code for MacPaint is available from the Computer History Museum.
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/

Re:How could they usefully study such software...

[Osgeld]

you mean this unavailable source code?

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/

Re:How could they usefully study such software...

[gl4ss]

sometimes it is known, like in case of macpaint.
and usually you can quite easily deduct if the sw was written in basic or assembler... or otherwise learn from how the sw works how it was written and why(memory constraints and what have you).

I don't think macpaint was really that much used though.

Re:How could they usefully study such software...

[John Hasler]

Ok. I was unaware that the source was available.

Re:How could they usefully study such software...

[Teancum]

Source code for much of the early groundbreaking software is still available. Indeed it was the closing up of much of the software that came later which started the "Free Software" people like Richard Stallman to start the GNU project and the GPL license.

Re:How could they usefully study such software...

[BasilBrush]

These programs are influential because of their features, paradigms and UIs. Not their source code, which may not have been influential at all. The source is pretty irrelevant, other than to specialist computer archeologists.

POV-Ray

[volkerdi]

This introduced a lot of people to 3-D rendering, and the free-enough license led to widespread adoption.

Re:POV-Ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I didn't know POV-Ray was that old. I had to use it last year in an uni course for some basic 3D modeling.

Re:POV-Ray

[Dahamma]

Ok, I suddenly feel old when software released in 1990 is now considered "early" ;)

Re:POV-Ray

[atomican]

I could never get into POV-Ray. I just couldn't conceive how to make an interesting scene if I had to type in the definitions myself and there wasn't an interactive GUI to create and define shapes with instead. Blender is more my thing these days, and even then it's a bit of a handful.

Freehand, Pagemaker and UltraPaint

[anavictoriasaavedra]

Aldus Freehand, Deneba UltraPaint and Aldus PageMaker. Oh the memories!

Re:Freehand, Pagemaker and UltraPaint

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even better Deneba Canvas.

Re:!Influential

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Never met someone as clueless as you. Nice showing of absolute incompetence, lack of knowledge and total douchebaggery. To quote Wolfgang Pauli (famous scientist) : "Not even wrong".

Why would CS study history?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The study of history is a perfectly valid field and has some researchers and courses of study that focus specifically on technological and scientific developments. It would certainly be quite reasonable for influential software and hardware to end up being studied here, same as any other relevant developments from fire and cave-painting to the present.

CS, though, seems like an odd place to roll out history beyond the level of name-checking discovers of algorithms and the like. Much of what is historically influential is either excessively bound to its time(writing a functional business software package in assembly may be impressive; but learning that somebody did so probably won't teach you much about modern software design or even be terribly efficient at teaching the architecture they wrote it for), or sufficiently timeless as to make its historical details a matter of politeness; but not really relevance(it is a polite convention to credit the discoverer of an algorithm or the originator of a concept; but the result stands by itself).

If anything, the expectation that 'Computer Science' would include a dose of history suggests the influence of the fairly lousy state of science education(at least among people not directly on a science track): much lower level 'Science' curriculum is heavily larded with pure history because the present state of the art is too complex or fast moving(and, unfortunately, often because even the historical science is considered too mathematically intimidating and so is taught as historical anecdote instead).

Re:Why would CS study history?

[Antique Geekmeister]

I'll beg to disagree with the idea that history is irrelevant to CS. Protocols, and practices, did not eveolve in a vacuum. Knowledge of how early principles were derived, and why we've migrated to newer approaches, is critical to understanding ongoing changes in a field. Moore's law, for example, led us from extremely limited command line interfaces to today's sophisticated GUI's. But understanding the original command line interfaces is vital to seeing _why_ modern tools aren't all in XML with back end databases.

Re:Why would CS study history?

[sjames]

In physics, we learn about older theories and the reasoning that lead to them, then the new experiment that disproved them and what came next. Physics isn't just a body of current theories, it's a process with a history. Understanding the process is probably more important than understanding the current theories.

CS could stand a bit of that.

I would love to make "the history of software" a mandatory course for anyone who will ever be involved in software patents. While we're at it, a history of science and engineering should be mandatory.

Re:Why would CS study history?

[Anonymous Coward]

_why_ modern tools aren't all in XML with back end databases

...because vestiges of sanity inexplicably remain?

Don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Leisure Suit Larry

Re:Don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

MacPlaymate

Re:Don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

As I recall LSL was just a graphic front end on an old adventure game called SoftPorn Adventure.

Re:Don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

On the topic of games.

Doom. What other game single handedly shaped the direction of consumer hardware. Not only that but out of the box it was relatively easy to modify with new levels, which has become defacto standard for PC games (ignoring shitty port jobs).

Vi, no Emacs!

[DavidClarkeHR]

VisiCalc

I wonder if we can nominate turing as a wetware piece of a complex software program. Unless I miss my guess, he inspired VisiCalc.

You are ALL wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Early? Influential? Deserving acclaim?

Lady Ada Lovelace's algorithms. That one was easy.

Re:You are ALL wrong

[mark-t]

Early? Sure... but influential? Not really... if they had been, why was funding for engine stopped?

Under-appreciated

[descubes]

Microsoft BASIC and later Visual Basic: Unjustly despised, but introduced many to programming (and the very first ones were marvels of micro-programming too). Also interestingly portable at a time where portability was on nobody's radar.

Spectre GCR, a Mac emulator on Atari ST. A precursor of virtualization in my opinion, and a very smartly done one at that.

VMware for making virtualization available to the masses and enabling the cloud.

AmigaDOS for being the first OS with built-in hardware-accelerated graphics and sound.

The RPL system in the HP28 and HP48 series of calculator. Reverse Polish Lisp and symbolic processing on a 4-bit calculator with 4K of RAM? Seriously?

The Minitel system in France, including nationwide phone directory and dubious innovations such as Minitel Rose (porn in text mode at 1200bps, basically).

Postscript and the whole desktop publishing revolution.

NeXTStep (or whatever the CorRect CapItalizATION is), so far ahead of its time that it took years for it to reach its full potential in the form of iOS.

GeOS (already mentioned by someone else)

Mathematica. Just wow. But also forgotten precursors such as TK! Solver.

Lisp, Fortran, Algol, Pascal, Ada, Eiffel, Smalltalk and a whole bunch of under-utilized languages.

Much lower on the name recognition scale, Alpha Waves, arguably one of the earliest real 3D games, which also influenced the creation of Alone in the Dark.

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to mention BASIC, logically pdp10 BASIC (and some of the other DEC versions) should be credited. The Microsoft version was after
all a redo of that language, reportedly done with the DEC listings by the side of the coders. The language was widely used on many DEC OSs
over the years as well as migrated. While adding graphics and other operations was good to have done, the same was done on other languages
in DEC-land before. (FOCAL got some such.)

FORTRAN, COBOL, and LISP deserve mention as well. At one time FORTRAN was considered "the only universal assembler" and was used
to demonstrate portability and machine independent coding, without which demonstration later languages might have been slower to get out.

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who was fortunate enough to grow up around a variety of computer platforms, your list is perhaps the best. MS Basic and later QBasic and VB.Net were the things I wrote the most code in and therefore learned the most from. By the time I got to .NET, I had a great understanding of how programming works. Amiga OS showed me the future like nothing else before or after. It was the first GUI that had a useful CLI to, not just icons and menus.

RPL gave me something to do in high school to truly elevate myself beyond the ordinary TI calculator show and tell. It also taught me a great deal about programming efficiency.

And VMWare was probably the first time I was impressed as a professional computer geek.

Right on man :-)

Re:Under-appreciated

[terjeber]

Lisp, Fortran, Algol, Pascal, Ada, Eiffel, Smalltalk and a whole bunch of under-utilized languages.

Listing all of those, and not starting with Simula, is absurd. Simula is the most under-appreciated language of all compared to its influence. Everybody is doing today what those guys were doing when most people were punching holes in cards.

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

Mathematica. Just wow.

Mathematica didn't do anything that the other two big M symbolic solvers didn't do already at the time. What it had, in typical Stephen Wolfram fashion, was a lot of hype and large marketing budget.

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

Spectre GCR, a Mac emulator on Atari ST. A precursor of virtualization in my opinion, and a very smartly done one at that.

Ooh, you just reminded me of Shapeshifter, a Mac emulator for Amiga. The amazing thing about Shapeshifter was it ran faster than an equivalent Mac machine -- it offloaded (virtualized?) a lot onto the Amiga's custom chip hardware, meaning the CPU had less to do than on a real Mac.
 

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

>Mathmatica

Um, Mathmatica is way later and copies many other programs. Try Maple or MathCAD, both of which predate Mathmatica.

"The first concept of Maple arose from a meeting in November 1980 at the University of Waterloo. Researchers at the university wished to purchase a computer powerful enough to run Macsyma. Instead, it was decided that they would develop their own computer algebra system that would be able to run on lower cost computers. The first limited version appearing in December 1980 with Maple demonstrated first at conferences beginning in 1982. The name is a reference to Maple's Canadian heritage. By the end of 1983, over 50 universities had copies of Maple installed on their machines."

Re:Under-appreciated

[bcrowell]

Microsoft BASIC and later Visual Basic: Unjustly despised, but introduced many to programming (and the very first ones were marvels of micro-programming too). Also interestingly portable at a time where portability was on nobody's radar.

MS Basic, hell yeah. Amazing what they did in a few k of code. And when your code is in ROM, you don't get to release bug fixes after the fact -- it has to be solid when it ships.

VB ... not so much.

Mathematica. Just wow. But also forgotten precursors such as TK! Solver.

AFAIK, Maxima was the first, dating back to the 1960's. And guess what? It's still open source and works great.

Re:Under-appreciated

[SoftwareArtist]

Mathematica. Just wow. But also forgotten precursors such as TK! Solver.

Macsyma predated it by 20 years, did most of the same things, and is still widely used and actively developed today (renamed to Maxima).

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

4k of ram is a lot for rpl. rpl may run almost completely from rom.

Re:Under-appreciated

[miroku000]

Microsoft BASIC and later Visual Basic: Unjustly despised, but introduced many to programming (and the very first ones were marvels of micro-programming too). Also interestingly portable at a time where portability was on nobody's radar.

How do you consider these portable? Because they were compatible with both Windows 3.0 as well as Windows 3.1?

Re:Under-appreciated

[znark]

Under-appreciated, you say?

On CP/M:

• WordStar, one of the most influental word processors of its time. Even today, several character-mode text editors make use some of the shortcuts which originated on WordStar.
• The CP/M operating system itself, which was quite popular back in the day and gave inspiration to PC-DOS/MS-DOS.

On the Commodore 64:

• GEOS by Berkeley Softworks. Who would have thought the venerable C64 could host a GUI system almost making it comparable to the first Macintosh models (not quite, but suprisingly close, given the 8-bit processor, memory limits etc.) There was a host of serious productivity applications for this environment.
• PageFox: a desktop publishing system for the C64.
• Microrhythm: a digital drum machine based on the undocumented sample playback features of the SID chip.
• The SID audio chip, which was way more feature-rich than its competitors of the time, and in some ways comparable to a “real” synthesizer, giving actual character and resonance to computer music, instead of just beeps and blips. Its creator, Bob Yannes, later went on to found Ensoniq, a company which designed and manufactured actual musical instruments (keyboards, samplers, etc.) The SID was a unique piece of audio hardware which enabled the musical software of the C64 to do its magic – and its legacy still lives on in the form of numerous emulators, vast sound archives and libraries (such as HVSC), custom-built musical instruments based on the chip (such as the SIDStation), etc. This is one of those cases where a piece of hardware has been inspirational and influental and enabled a number of software applications which would have been pointless if it weren’t for the hardware.

On the Amiga platform:

• (The Ultimate) SoundTracker by Karsten Obarski, later followed by the even more popular, more advanced clones or derivatives: NoiseTracker and ProTracker. These started the whole computer music “tracker” genre as we know it today – with four sound channels in a stereo arrangement and digital instrument samples, no less.
• Audio Master, one of the first digital audio sample editors for an affordable personal computer. Supported stereo sound as well. (Often accompanied by inexpensive audio digitizers attached to the printer port.)
• Deluxe Paint by Dan Silva of Electronic Arts – the first paint program for the Amiga. Taking a different approach from its predecessors on other platforms (which were mostly toys), the Deluxe Paint was a very powerful bitmap graphics art package, featuring advanced multi-color blitter-enhanced free-form brush handling features and color cycli

Re:Under-appreciated

[descubes]

How do you consider these portable? Because they were compatible with both Windows 3.0 as well as Windows 3.1?

Regarding portability, I was thinking about the original 8-bit BASIC, which Microsoft went out of their way to port of a very large number of platforms. It was not 100% compatible from platform to platform, e.g. there were additional graphics or I/O keywords. But Microsoft is the reason the vast majority of microcomputers at the time came with a form of BASIC. Don't get me wrong, there were also many original implementations of BASIC (Sinclair, Oric, Texas Instruments, HP to name a few).

Re:Under-appreciated

[descubes]

You are right about Simula. There are just too many languages to not forget a few when you try to make a list.

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the best quote to back up your point, since it directly references an even earlier computer algebra system, Macsyma. By the by, a modernized descendant of Macsyma is available as open source under the name Maxima.

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

NeXTStep (or whatever the CorRect CapItalizATION is), so far ahead of its time that it took years for it to reach its full potential in the form of iOS.

+1 Also without it we might not have the WWW at all, or not in todays form.

Re:Under-appreciated

[serviscope_minor]

Macsyma predated it by 20 years

Yeah, bit it's just a program, not a new kind of science (tm).

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

>AmigaDOS for being the first OS with built-in hardware-accelerated graphics and sound.

AmigaDOS didn't have neither of those - the Amiga hardware did.

Re:Under-appreciated

[Anonymous Coward]

Toss in NeWS - another oBnoXiOUs capitalization example. Way ahead of X. As you noted, NeXTstep was great as well - too bad it wasn't staged on more powerful workstations such as SPARCstations and HP-9000s.

Re:Under-appreciated

[DavidHumus]

APL - both as a precursor to things like Mathematica, Matlab, and R but also as _still_ embodying the clearest, most consistent and extensible idea of arrays.

It's depressing to look at a brand-new language and see the concept of arrays is still muddy and hackish - "let's ignore the relation of a scalar to a vector to a matrix to higher-dimensional arrays" & "let's implement a whole set of string functions that parallel - poorly and incompletely - the same sort of array operations we'd also like for vectors of numbers" - compared to what APL outlined 50 years ago. It's not very complex, either. I learned it in less than 15 minutes when I was 13.

If you're interested, I touch on this simple, elegant concept in some of my blog entries: http://thoughttools.blogspot.com/2012/05/shapely-conversation-i-went-to.html .

Re:Under-appreciated

[terjeber]

Indeed there is.

Re:Under-appreciated

[jadv]

The C programming language and all its variations. The Unix operating systems and all its derivatives. Those have been around for a very long time and are still very much relevant.

Re:Under-appreciated

[unixisc]

I agree - Mathcad was beautiful

Re:Under-appreciated

[unixisc]

Since GP talked about NEXTSTEP, toss in Objective-C. As for Unix, I wish there was only ONE Unix, instead of all the myriad Unixes that there were - AT&T, BSD, later OSF/1 and all the CPU specific distros that were ever developed. Sorta like there is ONE Linux.

Games?

[innocent_white_lamb]

Colossal Cave Adventure
Space Invaders
Sargon chess
Leaderboard Golf

Re:Games?

[BasilBrush]

Space panic as the first platformer.
Pac man as the first game with power-ups. Also I think the first computer character franchise.
Elite as the first open ended space exploration.

Re:Games?

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

1K Chess on the Sinclair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess

Re:Games?

[rochrist]

Nobody has mentioned MUD or TinyMUD, and later the MOO and MUSH variations.

Re:Games?

[unixisc]

The original Civs - Civ & Civ II.

Lisp 1.5

[rmstar]

Lisp 1.5 was the first widely distributed Lisp sytem (and it includied an interpreter AND a compiler). Many people have completely forgotten about it, but among its contributions were to pioneer dynamic programming languages (as are ruby, python, etc, etc) AND garbage collecting. And many other things. It was staggeringly innovative.

Re:Lisp 1.5

[Darinbob]

And don't forget Macsyma, one of the first large computer applications. Also written in Lisp. And contrary to the original posting, serious computer science students do learn about Macsyma.

Re:Lisp 1.5

[gTsiros]

> garbage collecting

AHA! so it is THEIR fault!

C, C-Kermit, and HTML

[Antique Geekmeister]

Learn C to learn how things really work for the last few decades in the kernel and library spaces, learn the original specs of HTML to understand what Hypertext was really for, and learn C-Kermit to learn what configuraiton and control over a limited interface really means.

Re:C, C-Kermit, and HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

"...learn the original specs of SGML to understand what Markup Language was really for..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language

FTFY

The Clipboard

[gilgongo]

Not so much software as software tool, but if you're looking for the most influential and important thing in software, the clipboard probably wins hands down. Without it, most of the web would not exist, for one thing.
It also has the distinction of being invisible - out doesn't even feed back. Nothing comes close to it for ubiquitous power and influence.

Re:The Clipboard

[Anonymous Coward]

The clipboard is indeed great by I'm not clear on why you say 'most of the web would not exist'. How is hypertext clipboard-dependent?

Re:The Clipboard

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that was a reference to the vast amounts of copy-pasted code found on the interwebs.

Re:The Clipboard

[bar-agent]

It also has the distinction of being invisible - out doesn't even feed back.

It wasn't always invisible. As far as I know, the Macintosh brought the clipboard concept to the masses, and it came with the "Clipboard" desk accessory where you could see whatever the clipboard currently had in it.

In fact, I've just discovered that that feature is still in place. The OS X Finder has a "Show Clipboard" command in the Edit menu.

Re:The Clipboard

[Anonymous Coward]

The clipboard is not a program like almost everything else suggested here. It's more of a OS Service, like a fileserver, user- or window management. The/A clipboard viewer is just one client that uses the clipboard.

UCSD Pascal and FORTH

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd add UCSD Pascal. It was a Pascal "operating system" that ran on the Apple II and compiled to a "p-code" virtual machine. I don't think it was technologically the first virtual machine, but it was the first one most of us had ever encountered.

FORTH was another important contribution that compiled into a sort of intermediate machine code. It was cool because it was very tiny (a few K) and it let the user build very powerful "words" interactively. FORTH is still around today!

Both UCSD Pascal and FORTH were efforts to synthesize more powerful machines from the 8 bit processors that were commonly available in the 70's.

Re:UCSD Pascal and FORTH

[vlm]

I'd add UCSD Pascal. It was a Pascal "operating system" that ran on the Apple II and compiled to a "p-code" virtual machine.

Not just appleII but more or less any p-code compatible machine. Just like Java, it never lived up to its hype so if you wrote it on a A2 it was not as hard as porting assembly but not as easy as simply transferring the p-code and running.

A similar idea is the zcode that infocom adventures were written in... zork1.dat is bit for bit identical across any zcode interpreter, no matter if trs80, apple, or modern frotz.

I'd nominate "Adventure" as a prototypical text adventure.

Wordstar on a Cromemco Z2-D

[Anonymous Coward]

Wordstar was a revolution towards the end of the CP/M days.

On screen help menus, and every function was tied to a ctrl- key sequence.

Re:Wordstar on a Cromemco Z2-D

[KZigurs]

Why was this downvoted? CP/M was quite impressive and a requisite understanding in the history of OS's.

Re:Wordstar on a Cromemco Z2-D

[dryeo]

Not downvoted, just not upvoted. AC starts at zero.
And of course CP/M was impressive, somewhat cross-platform (by using a co-processor at times) and at the time important as the first real personal computer operating system.

NC

[Anonymous Coward]

Norton Commander

Android Nim

[uweg]

and Electric Pencil.....

He missed the point...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's asking the wrong question. Why do Computer Science programs teach about algorithms and programming, but miss the big picture -- the Internet? Computer Science programs aren't much different now than they were 20 years ago, except for the preferred languages. What good are those courses when they don't teach you how to code concurrently, securely, or for multi-tier client/server functionality? Why aren't Computer Science majors coming out ready to design, implement, and develop on a global scale? Business majors graduate with an understanding of what it takes to build a business in today's markets. Architects and engineers graduate with an understanding of what it takes to design and create things in today's world. Computer Science majors graduate without a firm understanding of how to code properly in today's world.

As you can tell, as a Computer Science graduate myself, I'm convinced that much of the Computer Science program is a waste of time. But at least they don't waste time studying and learning about antiquated software. It didn't "fall between the cracks," as he put it. It's ancient history, and no longer relevant.

Re:He missed the point...

[Smallpond]

Business majors graduate with an understanding of what it takes to build a business in today's markets. Architects and engineers graduate with an understanding of what it takes to design and create things in today's world.

No they don't. They come out with basic skills, just like CS majors (or doctors, lawyers, and so on), and need to work with experienced practitioners in order to become proficient. The best graduates are usually the ones who spent some time as an intern and got an idea of what actually goes on in their field.

SPICE

[Anonymous Coward]

The SPICE program made most other software possible on later computers.

Early software

[rossdee]

Wizardry on the Apple ][

Directory Opus on the Amiga

Re:Early software

[opusman]

Directory Opus on the Amiga

Thanks! :)

TUTOR (MOOC's, take note!)

[theodp]

TUTOR (also known as PLATO Author Language) is a programming language developed for use on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around 1965. TUTOR was initially designed by Paul Tenczar for use in computer assisted instruction (CAI) and computer managed instruction (CMI) (in computer programs called "lessons") and has many features for that purpose. For example, TUTOR has powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics, and features to simplify handling student records and statistics by instructors. TUTOR's flexibility, in combination with PLATO's computational power (running on what was considered a supercomputer in 1972), also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons - that is, games - including flight simulators, war games, dungeon style multiplayer role-playing games, card games, word games, and Medical lesson games such as Bugs and Drugs (BND).

1994 Message from CS Prof Daniel Sleator to Tim Berners-Lee: It would be possible for one person to write a new game (such as double bughouse chess) without having to write a half dozen graphics interfaces. Many really cool things change from being impossible to being quite feasible. (The PLATO system developed in the 70s at the University of Illinois had some of these properties: simple graphics available to all users, fast interaction among a large pool of users. The result was the development of a number of very popular and engrossing interactive games.)

Re:TUTOR (MOOC's, take note!)

[Anonymous Coward]

  Yes, and Plato had online help and interterminal talk. And notesfiles, precursor to... newsgroups and BBSes and much else.

how to make a 20-something's eye roll

[peter303]

Tell them stories about punch cards.

Legacy of Turbo Pascal

[MrEricSir]

I'm not sure Turbo Pascal's legacy is as influential as it should have been. Sure, plenty of modern IDEs owe a nod to TP, but what about the compiler? The thing was shockingly fast. I wish TP had been more influential in that regard.

Some interesting info about how Turbo Pascal's speed was achieved here.

Re:Legacy of Turbo Pascal

[sourcerror]

The compiler was fast, but the machine code it generated wasn't well optimized.

Re:Legacy of Turbo Pascal

[ejasons]

The compiler was fast, but the machine code it generated wasn't well optimized.

And it didn't have a linker, so it had to compiler everything, every time. That would have been very painful, except that the compiler was so fast.

"Jumpman" (c64), Archon, & "Barbarian" (Amiga)

[Miamicanes]

Jumpman: set the standard for 'playability' & 'fun'. I remember making fun of it when I saw the underwhelming graphics, but it had me hooked the first time I played it. Truly, one of the best games ever. Decades later, it's STILL playable

Archon: what can I say? It started where chess left off, hit the ground running, and just *oozed* "epic win" for concept & gameplay.

Barbarian: the game that INVENTED the concept of a "fatality" move

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Ii_YfJNvw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Do I reallyhave to say it?

[hellcow]

Quake. Then Quake 3.

Re:Do I reallyhave to say it?

[BasilBrush]

It was influenced by Doom. So I'd say Doom would be the one to go in the list, not Quake.

Re:Do I reallyhave to say it?

[ColaMan]

Which was influenced by wolfenstein...... not too sure if there was a decent first-person pseudo-3D shooter before that.

As an animator

[Grayhand]

It's all but been forgotten but Playmation, it later became Animation Master, got me started in CG animation. It wasn't the first animation software but it was the first to run high end code on consumer level machines. I started using it in the early 90s on an old 386sx notebook with 4 meg of ram. At a time when other lower end softwares had barely gotten above chrome balls it was starting to do character animation. After the Animation Master upgrade things got real interesting. A friend had gotten into Lightwave back when it was still bundled with an Amiga board. He claimed Lightwave could do anything Animation Master could do and proposed a weekly competition. I was busy that week and didn't have time to build and rig a model so in an hour I too a stock character and quickly did a shot of a character doing a back flip and a bow. I felt guilty since I didn't do the model myself due to time. Well he proudly showed me a crude landscape rotation. The model was extremely low res and half the polygons were flipped. Well then I ran my shot. His jaw dropped. I apologized for not having time to model anything. It really didn't make any difference because the point was proved since Lightwave couldn't begin to do what I had quickly thrown together. Needless to say it was the end of our weekly exchange of animations. Much has changed but 20+ years ago but Playmation/Animation Master showed what was going to be possible. Years before Toy Story I had the thought of doing an animated feature with Animation Master. What made it impossible wasn't the software it was the state of current technology at the time. That was the age of 40 meg hard drives and there was no easy way to output the film. I even considered saving it shot by shot on floppy disk and shooting it off a monitor onto film. Not too unlike how the first animations were transferred to film but it was still going to cost hundreds of thousands and take many years to finish. The whole point is it would have been possible software wise with Animation Master and it did give me a start. Many softwares have been forgotten over the years like D-Paint and Aldus Photostyler. They all had their issues but they got us started back at a time when hardware was more of the restricting factor than software was.

notator logic

[Anonymous Coward]

midi sequencing / music arranging software -> http://www.atarimusic.net/featured-articles/atari-music-software/247-a-history-of-notator-logic

ChiWriter

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a fantastic WYSIWYG editor that I used for Chemistry, Algebra, Calculus, Physics reports. The beautiful thing was that it ran in DOS and produced some beautiful printouts. It was the bomb!

My first ever "app", of course

[Anonymous Coward]

name: cornpone

language: fortran-77

input: punched cards

output: green-bar

This was so long ago, "apps" did not exist. And neither did most of you. It was the most influential for me.

MacPaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

MacPaint was more or less at the same level as MS Paint (granted, a few years earlier), but wasn't that important in terms of features. OCP Art Studio was a lot more impressive and influential.

To that I'd definitely add Antic's range: Cyber Paint, Cyber Studio and Cyber Control, which were the fathers of modern compositing software (ex., Autodesk Animator, Combustion), 3D modelers / renderers (3D Studio, 3ds Max) and 3D scripting (MaxScript, Renderman), respectively.

Re:MacPaint?

[Ronin Developer]

MacPaint and MacWrite were, I believe, the two programs that enabled the original Macintosh 128K to be accepted. It was easy to use and, while not as powerful as some DOS apps, we're fully interoperable wirh one another. I am among the first to receive the Macs at Drexel in 1984. Our curriculum was based around these two apps. And, you know what? It worked. Eventually we received other - the departments developed their own software as well.

I developed on the Lisa. But, the, languages and tools such as Microsoft Basic, Turbo Pascal for the Mac, Lightspeed Pascal ( the Lightspeed C) and MacForth became available. These tools were low in cost and enabled many apps to be written. And, due to the slowness of the CPU and limited resources of those early machines, learned the value of choosing or developing an algorithm that offered performance even on those old machines.

Today, many developers don't appreciate the art of developing those early systems - the libraries they use today are often rehashes of the optimized code written in the days of yore. Yes, today's students should appreciate those early contributions as they see what worked and what failed and why.

Halo

[jcr]

Not the video game, the graphics library from Media Cybernetics.

First one on the IBM PC that had the concept of drivers to support display boards from different manufacturers. I worked there for a while in technical sales support, and when I was there we were covering 35 different boards. Before Halo, every manufacturer had their own display API.

-jcr

XtreePro

[bagofbeans]

That and Norton Utilities made DOS useable.

But XTP's superlative use of the screen area and hotkeys was stunningly competent.

Re:XtreePro

[denmon]

XTree's learning curve was not shallow, but once you got the hang of it you could amazing things. Select all thousand .c and .h files, recursively in a large directory tree, and copy those and only those (maintaining the directory structure!) to another drive? Fifteen seconds. Let's see if I remember how. Branch, Filespec *.c, Tag, Filespec *.h, Tag, Showall, Invert tag, Alt-copy branch, Relative paths. Boom, done. Rename all your jpegs in a directory with a prefix for the site they came from, but preserving the rest of the filename? No problem. You could even create a custom batch file in which you could create any commandlines you wanted, substituting in whatever parts of the file/directory names you wanted at various places.

For those who miss XtreePro, there is an excellent reimplementation called ZtreeWin (http://www.ztree.com/). It's still text mode, but is a native Windows app (no Command Prompt needed, supports long file names, etc). The author is very respectful to the XTree legacy but has also carefully added additional useful functionality. One of the few pieces of shareware that I've gotten enough value from to spend my own money to donate/register.

Re:XtreePro

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 for these amazing pieces of software. Norton utils today wishes it were worthy to lick the boots of the DOS edition.

Re:XtreePro

[N0Man74]

When I saw this thread, the first thing I did was hit Ctrl+F, and search for XTree. I was amazed to only find these two comments on the software. It was one of the most useful and powerful utilities I've ever known.

Re:XtreePro

[N0Man74]

Also... I forgot to mention. UED. That is the DOS text editor I configured for XTree to use. It wasn't until Notepad++ that I stopped using it... and there are a still a few things easier and faster to do in UED.

Features (copied form the above site):

  - Ability to edit up to 9 files in memory at once
  - Files as large as 1000 characters wide and 10,000 lines long
  - File size is only limited by available memory
  - Split screen editing
  - Typeover and insert mode editing
  - Search and replace (both case sensitive and insensitive)
  - Cut and paste (three modes: line, range, and block)
  - Escape to DOS
  - Can load "piped" files
  - Wildcard expansion of command line arguments
  - Word wrap and paragraph reformat
  - Smart indentation

Turbo Pascal

[0xdeadbeef]

Visual Studio and Xcode are bloated jokes in comparison.

You know you've got a killer app when....

[PapayaSF]

Once in an interview, Dan Bricklin (IIRC) said that in the early days they personally demonstrated VisiCalc at trade show booths. Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it with this new piece of software.

You know you've got a killer app when a demo causes members of your target market to realize how much your software is going to change their lives, and they burst into tears.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[swillden]

You know you've got a killer app when a demo causes members of your target market to realize how much your software is going to change their lives, and they burst into tears.

Especially when your target market is a bunch as prone to emotional outbursts as accountants.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes accountants would actually cry, as they realized how many hours they'd spent adding up rows and columns of numbers, and how quickly they'd be able to do it with this new piece of software.

Developers, making jobs obsolete and enjoing the torment of the victims since WWII.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[khallow]

The job of accounting hasn't been hurt by the spreadsheet. Instead, it's expanded their role since now accountants can keep track of so much more than they used to.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. An Accounting lecturer told of a time before VisiCalc when management would change one value and so all sheets had to be changed manually and they would have wasted hours adding up the previous numbers.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's called good marketing.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[miroku000]

You know you've got a killer app when a demo causes members of your target market to realize how much your software is going to change their lives, and they burst into tears.

Sometimes you burst into tears when management tells you they want you to adopt Lotus Notes, or Novel Netware. That doesn't make either of those a Killer app...

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you've got a killer app when a demo causes members of your target market to realize how much your software is going to change their lives, and they burst into tears.

Timesheet apps must be a killer then. They've sure made me wanna cry.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[Anonymous Coward]

"change their lives"="make them worthless to their employer"

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[OldBus]

Huh? When I show my books to my accountant he regularly bursts into tears...

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[swalve]

Lotus Notes is a great idea, implemented horribly. But Netware? They basically invented the fileserver. They were doing things 15 years ago that MS can barely do now.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[tehcyder]

The great thing about Visicalc was that it's target audience (as you say, initially accountants) knew all about cost/benefit analysis. There was little or no sentimentality about introducing a tool that could so clearly make your productivity rocket.

You only need to have been forced to add up, manually, thirty sheets of 16 column analysis paper with running totals, or tried to do a moderately complex cashflow forecast in order to fully appreciate the joy of a spreadhseet.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[tehcyder]

You know you've got a killer app when a demo causes members of your target market to realize how much your software is going to change their lives, and they burst into tears.

Sometimes you burst into tears when management tells you they want you to adopt Lotus Notes, or Novel Netware. That doesn't make either of those a Killer app...

I know this is slashdot, and we're big on our pseudo-autistic blindness to human emotion, but even you must have heard of the difference between tears of joy and tears of despair?

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[operagost]

Or laughter...

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[SolitaryMan]

To their defence, they probably wanted to be lion tamers.

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[suutar]

that depends how hard they take it...

Re:You know you've got a killer app when....

[mattack2]

Seems like you really mean 30 years ago (at least according to Wikipedia).

Though also checking the Wikipedia for Corvus(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_Systems/), which I remember using in school *around* the same time, that seems to be a file server too. Maybe different computers couldn't use the same "volume" (e.g. simulated 5.25" floppy) at the same time?

ACP, Basic, Polaris

[davebarnes]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Control_Program
Made commercial flying possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_(computer_language)
Let regular people do programming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_missile
Think about it. You launch a missile from underwater anywhere in the world's oceans and drop the bomb on Moscow.

Re:ACP, Basic, Polaris

[tilante]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Control_Program Made commercial flying possible.

Umm... released in 1968. Commercial passenger flight was a few decades old at that point. It may have made it easier, but certainly didn't make it possible.

Time for the Wayback machine

[Gim Tom]

I think THE ELECTRIC PENCIL was one of the very first word processing programs and may deserve to be on the list. I saw Algol-60 mentioned in one of the comments, but when I first used Turbo Pascal it seemed a lot like the Algol I used on a Burroughs B-5500 back in the early 1960's. Of course, no matter what one thinks of the current products the original BASIC for the ALTAR 8800 by some guys named Bill and Allen might have a place in history. It also generated the first complaint of people copying software instead of buying it by the aforementioned Bill. I am not sure one would call it a program, but the C language is itself a major piece of past, current and future history. There must be many more

RSX-11M

[oddaddresstrap]

RSX-11M, DEC's multiuser real-time OS for the PDP-11 line of mini-computers

Re:RSX-11M

[unixisc]

And VMS after it. Too bad DEC is one of the casualities that's no longer around

Toker

[Anonymous Coward]

Built by Michigan State University CS in the late 70's, ran on an 8K Commodore PET.

First stoner game and fun to play.
 

Operating System anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say the/a crossplatform operating system was the groundbreaking piece of software. DOS/WINDOWS is what has shaped computers up to what it is today. Any apps are just toys.

Lisp Machine Lisp and vi

[presidenteloco]

Lisp Machine Lisp - programs written on the various Lisp Machine variants are still probably among the most sophisticated and elegant software ever produced.

vi editor - The simplicity, efficiency, and often overlooked ergonomic excellence for the fingers (cf. emacs) has made vi a classic that remains highly relevant today.

Tiny BASIC

[localroger]

Tiny BASIC pretty much made hobby computing possible; before Microsoft came along it opened the computer hobby up to people who couldn't or couldn't be bothered to learn machine language.

Unix sketchpad

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the more influential (in a good sense) packages are:
UNIX as a kernel, a user space software collection and as a philosophy.
Sketchpad as probably the first graphical GUI and vector drawing program

There has been a lot of software with bad influences, for example:
VisiCalc (plunged the world into the dark age of spreadsheets)
PowerPoint ('nuf said)
Apple iOS (made even look Microsoft's product of the time, Windows CE, look open)

There's also software which should deserve more acclaim:
GRAIL (google for Alan Kay GRAIL) was an early graphical programming language
Smalltalk enabled children and untrained adults alike to write amazing software

PCTools 2.41e

[GerardAtJob]

I learned so many things with PCTools 2.41e, from formatting (I was a noob really) to hex editing (Removed face-off copy protection, and even created complete hack list for EyeOfTheBeholder lol)...

I have so much memories with this program... and when I tryed the next version, it was so poor and with so less features....

RUNOFF

[yesterdaystomorrow]

RUNOFF on CTSS (1964) turned the computer into a document preparation tool. From there we got Multics runoff. The UNIX developers justified their early efforts by promising to bring runoff to AT&T without the expense of Multics. And now RUNOFF has many descendents, both in the form of markup languages and document processing applications. These are arguably a more widespread and important use of computers than actual computation.

Re:RUNOFF

[Lawrence_Bird]

memories... briefly used it on TOPS before finding out about TeX (which was only a few years old at the time).

Pre internet, you bought a computer to make things

[joeaguy]

Before the internet, computers were a tool and not just a screen to get you to what someone else already had made. You got a computer because you wanted to make things. It could be a document, an image, a song, software that could be used to make more and other things. Computers were mainly purchased by those who wanted to use them as a tool for creative and practical purposes. All you could consume on computers in the pre-internet age were games, and consoles were usually cheaper and better for that, or the few expensive and slow online services that you could reach over dialup.

So this made a huge difference for early software. The windowed GUI interface that is everywhere today was designed for desktop publishing, by Xerox, a company whose business is making documents. The phone and tablet interfaces that are growing now and the first centered around consumption of data instead of creation of data. This is a huge switch which makes it even more important to remember software history.

So a few titles I think are of note:

The Print Shop - One of the most popular programs in the 80s. Most people's first experience with anything like desktop publishing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Print_Shop
BASIC - This language introduced many people to programming, and was a default built in feature of most early computers.
Deluxe Paint - Bitmapped graphics program by Electronic Arts - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint
HyperCard - Multimedia software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
SuperPaint - Combined bitmap and vector graphics in one program - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperPaint_(Macintosh)
SoundEdit - The first popular GUI sound editor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundEdit
TheDraw - Text editor for making ASCII/ANSI art - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw
ResEdit - GUI builder for early mac - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit

That's just what I can think of so far.

CP/67

[Anonymous Coward]

But then I am an ancient

SoundTracker

[Miamicanes]

The app itself was kind of buggy & brittle, but Karsten Obarski is basically the father of modern game music that doesn't suck. OK, Chris Hülsbeck was breaking plenty of ground of his own & blowing us away with HIS work (and continues to do so today), but Obi was the one who gave us a programmer-friendly toolchain & notation for composition, editing, *and* incorporation of the music into working software. It fit the typical game-development workflow of its era like a glove, and almost overnight set the standard for what Amiga (and later, PC) owers *expected* from computer-generated music.

VisiCorp Visi On

[linebackn]

I nominate VisiCorp Visi On. It is often forgotten, but it beat Microsoft as the first full GUI for the IBM PC and heavily influenced their push to create Microsoft Windows. Among other reasons it heavily illustrates the state of GUIs in 1983 prior to much influence from the Mac or Lisa.

Also, the Xerox Star and Xerox Alto, especially the Smalltalk environment.

There is actually a Xerox Alto emulator out there called SALTO with some disk images, but no complete images of Alto Smalltalk yet.

Of course all of these were influential in the area of GUIS. There were certainly others that were influential in areas that aren't so easily visible.

Paradox for DOS and Commodore 64 Logo

[C0L0PH0N]

Paradox for DOS was a breakthrough program for its time, permitting fairly serious multi user networked business applications to be built in DOS with a relational database. The PAL (Paradox Application Language) was very powerful. I built a rock solid and fast multiuser system for a mental health clinic with it. And Commodore 64's Logo was actually HP's graphics language in disguise, a great program for what it was and for its time.

Re:Paradox for DOS and Commodore 64 Logo

[jedwidz]

Oracle RDBMS - first commercially-available relational database with an SQL interface.

Emacs and Lotus Agenda

[chipschap]

Emacs (mentioned above somewhere) .... still going strong after ... what ... 35 years? It does everything. Some people even use it as a text editor. Lotus Agenda ... undersold, underappreciated, but nothing has ever come along quite like it or quite as good.

The real granddaddy of FPS: SpaceWar!

[Teancum]

Of any game that was ever made, I'd have to say SpaceWar! was the game that blew all others out of the water. It was contemporary with even the concepts of real-time programming and timeshare systems, and predated microcomputers by nearly a decade.

Arguably Doom was just SpaceWar with improved graphics and a better map. It makes hunt the Wumpus look incredibly lame.

The Oregon Trail was something that predated even Pong even though it came after SpaceWar. Still, that game was the granddaddy of all quest-type games, and I still remember as a kid learning how to type "BANG" and "POW" just to be able to hunt some meat. Reading the output of the game on yellow teletype paper seemed to give an experience which is hard to imagine today.

Re:The real granddaddy of FPS: SpaceWar!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Especially the variant of Spacewar that ran on the pdp-1x at MIT. Normal and homing torpedoes, hyperspace, impressive graphics for its day,
a REAL starchart. All done in assembler language on an 18 bit machine. For those not in the know, the pdp1x had many generations of grad students
adding instructions (change between 1's complement and 2's complement, reverse sense of all bits...). It was described at the time as the "most powerful
and most disorganized instruction set of any minicomputer on Earth". There was a 3D spacewar (moved around planets, a much harder game than
the original since you spent much of your time trying to find your opponents) for the same machine late in its existence. I hope the good old iron got
moved somewhere and not scrapped.
It was a better interactive game than any of the micro based boxes had for many years. There is, by the way, a Java version of one of the Spacewar
variants around on internet. It looks something like the original screens, tho without a switch register its play is not the same...

Re:The real granddaddy of FPS: SpaceWar!

[Teancum]

The Computer History Museum not only has a working version of the game, but even restore the Digital Equipment PDP-1 computer which ran the original version so many years ago. This game was so far ahead in its design that it is a shock to even think that most other games that followed for a decade are a step backward in quality and sophistication.

Re:The real granddaddy of FPS: SpaceWar!

[davydagger]

everyone played oregon trail as a kid.

version 1.x for the apple IIe/Dos and ver 2 for the mac

Re:The real granddaddy of FPS: SpaceWar!

[fermion]

Tradewars. I have seen no other game where the winning strategy was to nuke the fuzz out of existence. GTA is tame by comparison. Most so called war simulation do not even let you take out school busses.

Re:The real granddaddy of FPS: SpaceWar!

[Teancum]

Oregon Trail started out as a tiny project done by three college students who were doing teaching internships and wanted to make history become more interesting than dry facts. It was written in FORTRAN and soon after its conception was installed on a Control Data Cyber system computer being operated by the University of Minnesota for a consortium of schools throughout the state of Minnesota called MECC (before it became known with the same name as a computer software company). Version 1.0, as it were, really was this early version done on a teletype that had as its only sound effect the control-G character which triggered an actual physical bell on teletype machines.... by far the most common type of machine which was used to play this game.

This was the version I played in 4th grade and was my first experience with actual computers. That teletype terminal was connected to the University of Minnesota via a Bell 103 acoustical modem and a dedicated long-distance telephone line subsidized by the taxpayers of Minnesota.

There were other games that ran on that same system, including a very early MUD, a predecessor to IRC, and a game simply called COMBAT that was by far the best ship to ship space combat game I ever played for nearly a decade and in some ways even superior to SpaceWar in quality in terms of game mechanics (it could have up to about 20 players at the same time simultaneously).

Life did exist prior to microcomputers, including computer games.

Re:The real granddaddy of FPS: SpaceWar!

[tehcyder]

everyone played oregon trail as a kid.

Only in the US.

UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

'Nuff said

Re:"Jumpman" (c64), Archon, & "Barbarian" (Ami

[gl4ss]

there's another barbarian which could take the price for the shittiest ui ever on a game people still felt compelled to play. without the shitty ui it would have been a short game too.. (also, the trick to actually playing it was to use the keyboard, but even still the ui sucks bigtime since the hotkeys were an afterthought)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j49oca99wIs

Napster...MS GWBasic...Windows 3.0

[dtjohnson]

Napster - this is the software that kicked off the idea of music file sharing. Okay, the record companies hated this program but this is the first program that I can think of that really CONNECTED people as a group on the internet for exchanging data.

MS GW Basic - this was the basic that shipped with the IBM PC and was pretty much what much of its early software was written in because it was so simple to use and yet could be used to do quite a bit.

Windows 3.0 - This was the first version of Windows that people really used and really brought the GUI desktop with the mouse into the mainstream. Okay, the first Macintosh from Apple did that too and came before Windows 3.0 by a ways but it was not nearly as widely used, especially in the workplace.

Re:Napster...MS GWBasic...Windows 3.0

[rastos1]

Napster - this is the software that kicked off the idea of music file sharing

I could tell you about the software that kicked off the idea of sharing, but I would have to violate the rule #1.

Re:Napster...MS GWBasic...Windows 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Napster was one of many file sharing applications and the sharing of stuff did not start with it. Napster is just the application that got the most media hype.

GW basic was not used much at all to make DOS applications, i have a large box with old DOS stuff and i can remember one single app written in GW Basic at all, let alone find one now.

Windows 3.0 was unusable and it was not until 3.1 it became almost workable but even then DOS was used the most. Windows was fun to play with but not much work was possible in it. It was not until Windows 95 it made any serious impact and the much because of the advent of browsers and the internet.

Re:Napster...MS GWBasic...Windows 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC+FTP

Amazing

And still the best way.

I wondered this myself recently

[damnbunni]

I started computing with a VIC-20, and grew up with a C-64. I never really used the 'must have' apps that made businesses want computer in the first place, though. I knew about them, and knew my uncle spent a fortune on an Apple II to run them for his store, but knew little about them.

So recently I picked up a Commodore 128D and got some CP/M software: WordStar, dBASE II, and VisiCalc. After some configuration brouhaha (this wasn't easy, without the manuals!) I gave them a go.

What most surprised me was how usable they all are, still. Oh, the interfaces require actual studying, but WordStar's is sensible, and dBASE's total lack of anything resembling user friendliness at least exposes its raw flexibility.

Of course, then my 30-year old Commodore monitor let the blue smoke out of the capacitors, so it's out of commission till I get them replaced.

I think having current compsci people take at least a brief course using these old, old programs might help them understand not all that much has really changed - and maybe inspire them to change things.

Who knows? Probably couldn't hurt, at least.

Re:I wondered this myself recently

[chipschap]

Your remark is an interesting take on what really is and isn't necessary. Does the current version of Word, whatever it is, produce better communication than WordStar did? I didn't say prettier documents with more fonts, I said better communication. Early word processors provided an essential thing, freedom from the tyranny of the typewriter and its difficulties with corrections and revisions. That was a noticeable step forward in enabling better communication. How much further have we really come with all the features, bells and whistles? The argument for modern software may be stronger with spreadsheets, but VisiCalc did quite a few things. Excel does more of it, at the price of possible (likely?) embedded errors, especially in complex spreadsheets, which become nigh on to incomprehensible at some point. The biggest difference in my mind, with respect to better communication and doing better business, is in graphics and graphical presentation. That indeed has advanced enormously.

Re:I wondered this myself recently

[Anonymous Coward]

The C-128 has a Hercules connector (albeit named different in the manual). So just grab a Hercules screen from your local second-hand store.

Re:I wondered this myself recently

[unixisc]

I've forgotten which version they did this, but I'd say that in the version that they introduced auto-correct, Microsoft really did a lot of good. Those were real improvements - unlike in Office 97, where they introduced the ribbons, which made Mr Clippy look good. Auto-grammer check was not as good. The Office tools that have produced the greatest advances in Communications are PowerPoint and Excel - PowerPoint for almost elimating the need of words in presentations, and Excel for enabling some of the most complex data presentations that can be imagined through the use of Pivot Tables and the like.

Word Perfect 5

[krisyan]

It's still my favorite word processor.

Re:Word Perfect 5

[jfdavis668]

Used it for years to make amazing documents. Wouldn't want to do it again.

Norton Commander

[rockerito]

Don't forget Norton Commander (from which Midnight Commander and Total Commander descended)

Also, for me, QBasic, Turbo Pascal, the Norton Guide (with an assembler guide that had each asm instruction and each DOS interruption listed). Norton Disk Doctor, to fix broken floppy disks.

The AfterDark screensavers for Windows 3.1 (this was the one with the flying toasters), which could activate when sending the mouse cursor to a corner of the screen (hahah, what does that remind me of?).

Though I regret to admit it, Visual Basic 3.0 was the first IDE I've seen that let you create GUI's by dragging and dropping buttons and form elements. I don't know if it was the first ever IDE to do this, but it was the first I've seen.

Re:Norton Commander

[rduke15]

Indeed, Norton Commander was absolutely essential in DOS. And now, Total Commander is on all the Windows machines I touch, and is the Windows software I miss the most on my main Linux machine and on the many Macs I use. Midnight Commander is great, but not as featurefull as Total Commander. Krusader is what comes closest, but it is definitely not as rock solid and reliable as TC. On the Macs which are not mine, I sometimes install muCommander, but that is no match for TC.

Re:Norton Commander

[ixvo]

THIS

Norton Commander (from which Midnight Commander and Total Commander descended)

Norton Commander ("nc") basically made it possible for non professionals to use DOS. IMHO its UI is much more user-friendly than most of those which were released in the last 5 to 10 years.

Norton Disk Doctor, to fix broken floppy disks.

and PC Tools. My father still used it in ca 2005 after I failed to rescue a deleted thesis from a cousin's floppy disk using common Unix commands. And succeeded, to my amazement.

Too much?

[CyberRacer]

It's kind of too broad a question to begin with, and will largely depend on when you 1st "discovered" computers. I'm kinda old school.. so I might say Livermoore Basic, Tiny basic, or as a fun one. "Zork" (which actually came along years after I had already discovered the joys of computer geekdom)! If you re really into doing a complete history.you'd have to go back all the way to the Babbage computing engines.. or even before that. . While one certainly reminisces about "the grand old days" of this particular program or that, ultimately it boils down to just that: YOUR experiences with with those great old programs. And what might have been influential to me is now just so much saw dust under the feet of those moving on to the next "killer app". Not trying to say there weren't some very influential programs, the exact opposite in fact. There were a LOT of influential programs. Too many for a truly objective one size fits all list.

Flying Toasters, and Other Screensavers of Yore

[theodp]

The Late Movies: 10 Screensavers of Yore: 'Here's a roundup of some screensavers I remember from the Good Old Days of computing -- the 90s -- when screensavers were delightfully corny, 3D graphics meant "the future," and flying toasters invaded our dreams.'

Zork

[the eric conspiracy]

To me that was the killer app that triggered my first computer purchase.

What's really amazing is that it is still possible to enjoy this great game through the use of a ZIL interpreter.

Re:Zork

[jfdavis668]

I still play a copy of that every so often.

most computer Science programs are about theory

[Joe_Dragon]

most computer Science programs are about theory and not the business parts, It / networking, how to code (real skills), user experience / UI , ECT.

Re:most computer Science programs are about theory

[Will.Woodhull]

most computer Science programs are about theory and not the business parts, It / networking, how to code (real skills), user experience / UI , ECT.

Exactly. And that's a problem.

It is not like there are any other courses of study that address the impact of each Big Thing as it hits. Only the CS programs provide the background necessary to predicting what the next Big Thing will be, and CS students have a better background than anyone else for determining the risks associated with the next Big Thing in time to do some mitigation, or even steer the monster rather than letting it just bounce around, breaking stuff up.

Basically, I am arguing that CS students should be devoting some of their study to real world stuff, rather like statisticians, physiologists, ecologists, and other scientists who directly contribute to society do.

Re:most computer Science programs are about theory

[progician]

Perhaps CS students and professional programmers know exactly that technology is not about any "Big Thing" but consistent work on real problems. A freakin' word processor and click-n-place-a-dot programs (which I was able to make on C+4 when I was 12) does not constitute any kind of big art, big thing in the computer technology, or computer science.

All those stuff did not contribute to society much, though I understand that a layman perhaps perceive a word processor as something great, given that they have no understanding what their computer is capable of, I'm sure that the media hype around this things are great because journos are interested in these software as they are so freakin' worked up about the latest iphone. Never the less, Computer Science is way beyond consumer electronics, and there's nothing Big Thing out there. Re-inventing the wheel perhaps. Rewriting history, perhaps. MacWrite, MacPaint seriously?

Re:most computer Science programs are about theory

[serviscope_minor]

most computer Science programs are about theory and not the business parts,

That's not business parts, that's history.

Sure it's not part of the theory, but it's not exaclty unusual for courses to cover some of the history of their own subject.

NEXTSTEP

[Anonymous Coward]

Finest computing environment and network administration suite that I have seen since first using a DEC PDP-11 on acoustic-coupled greenbar terminal in 1979.

well CS IS NOT IT / NETWORKING / DESKTOP / SEVERS

[Joe_Dragon]

well CS IS NOT IT / NETWORKING / DESKTOP / SEVERS.

And this why that needs to be in a tech schools.

Ah Yee's silk gloves.

[Anonymous Coward]

They made handling that abacus feel so much nicer.

PCTools

[Anonymous Coward]

Was a must for the IBM compatible for quite awhile. Being able to see two directory trees side by side and perform operations with a mouse was huge for me...

Wolfenstein 3D

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much defined the FPS genre AFAIK

ncsa mosaic

[maxwells_deamon]

First real browser

then Netscape

Re:ncsa mosaic

[jfdavis668]

I still remember downloading the source and running the make file on HP UX. Amazing compared to Gopher.

Re:ncsa mosaic

[BasilBrush]

WorldWideWeb was the first real browser. The one written by Tim Berners Lee, 3 years before Mosaic.

Mosaic was the first popular one.

My list

[EmagGeek]

NDOS
PCTools
QEMM
DesqView
Deskmate
Wildcat and PCBoard
Sierra Games

Wrong premise

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual by self-centered people, rather than assuming your own knowledge should be known by everybody, why doesn't Dave Winer ask the teachers in charge of CS degrees why they are not teaching the software he presumes to be so valuable? Maybe then he would really learn why his comparison to shakespear sucks so much.

In fact, the whole logic is wrong, he first states knowledge of these programs should be mandatory, yet asks other people for knowledge about mandatory programs "he doesn't know". So they aren't mandatory if he doesn't know them? Otherwise why is he proclaiming himself the end all knowledge of what CS students should know?

The word for today is: confusion.

sol.exe

[gimmeataco]

Solitaire

MS DOS and Friends

[FrankHS]

All of these programs ran in MS DOS, itself on of the great programs. Sorry, Microsoft haters, but at that point in my life, DOS was they only operating system I knew.

Q&A was a word processor and database (sort of). It had the totally cool feature of being able to add a list of figures in a document! It did macros.

Borland C After giving up on Microsoft C, someone gave me a copy of Borland C which had the advantage that it actually worked.

Telix was a full featured shareware comm program that was written by 17 year old! It was the best one out there at the time.

Norton Disk Doctor and Spinrite to keep the hard drive going.

Dirmagic was a program that handled files and directories instead of using the clunk dos commands.

Lemmings - Just plain fun.

Star Control 2 Great space game that told a story

DesqView and QEMM Allowed you to multitask in DOS.

TeX

[Dr. Tom]

Not only is TeX practically the first open source program, it is still in use (rewritten, tho), along with all the tools it spawned.

Re:TeX

[Strange Attractor]

TeX, yes!

I wrote my first scientific article in Macwrite, my second in ditroff, and my third in LaTeX. Then I combined them into a dissertation. I chose to translate the fist two into LaTeX. My second choice would have been ditroff, and my third choice would have been to pay someone to type it all up. A better name for Macwrite would have been MacMemo. For anything longer than a page, it was awful. I don't know what value it has/had other than a cautionary tale for others to avoid.

I believe that after 30 years, it may be time for me to move beyond LaTeX. I'd like something I could program more easily. And I'd like support for describing function more than appearance.

Re:TeX

[dkf]

TeX (and its important derivative, LaTeX) utterly changed how academic publishing in mathematics and the sciences was done. Before, most published papers were typescripts (and difficult to read; formulæ were horribly mangled by this approach) and afterwards, every paper could be read quickly and easily. Total night-and-day difference. Even the best-produced papers before (which used tools like RUNOFF) were nothing like as good; TeX was transformative software from the future.

Don't believe me? Try reading old journals in an academic library. Lots of good ideas mouldering away there, yet they're almost without exception difficult to read purely by virtue of their formatting...

DBase III

[jfdavis668]

This is the product which made it easy to process large amounts of data on a PC. Never made a good windowed transition.

Re:DBase III

[Nefarious Wheel]

dBase IV, on the other hand, was picked up by Microsoft and eventually turned into MS Access.

Interesting aside -- much of the work that made dBase IV a usable product was contributed by Tom Rettig, who had an early career as an actor in a TV series about a boy and his dog. Yep, Lassie -- that Tommy Rettig.

So, if you ever consider that your Access application might run like a dog, well, there's a heritage there.

Re:DBase III

[unixisc]

No, dBase was acquired by Borland after dBase IV - I think it was dBase V where they took it over. Microsoft acquired their rival FoxPro.

ISPF

[jfdavis668]

Almost forgot ISPF. Can't do anything on a mainframe without it.

Lotus Ami Pro

[rduke15]

The only word-processor I ever really liked. And the reason why I switched to Windows from DOS and my own customized Turbo Pascal editor.

I immediately felt at ease with Ami Pro. Everything felt intuitive for someone who had started using computers mainly to get rid of typewriters. Other word processors at the time seemed like just different typewriters. But Ami Pro almost forced you to use styles instead of manual formatting. And it made the use of styles very obvious and easy, mapping them to the function keys. At last, something smarter and more useful than a typewriter.

I'm using LibreOffice now, but I'm unhappy and still long for the elegant simplicity of Ami Pro.

Don't forget Porn

[SternisheFan]

Often forgotten is that pornography was the reason for lots guys improving computer tech. It started with badly pixellated drawings of naked women. Then (OMG) eventually actual pictures! Porn was a driving force of internet/computer development. Here's to the lovely ladies! :)

FORTH

[satch89450]

This reverse Polish language was not a "mainstream" language, but for astronomers, it was perfect for telescope automation. FORTH was also used in other robotic things. I was really surprised that FORTH wasn't included on anyone's list. In fact, how many of you have ever heard of FORTH, let alone did any programming in it?

Re:FORTH

[Bing Tsher E]

I'm glad somebody mentioned it.

I just shelled out of Firefox and into the Play Store. Yes! There's a free FORTH interpreter for Android.

Re:FORTH

[Anonymous Coward]

I participated in a introduction to Forth workshop a year ago. It's a neat little language and fits really well for its application in firmware and similar nowadays.

Re:FORTH

[SlideRuleGuy]

Oh not again. When will we let that language die??!!??

I programmed in it for 6 years right out of college because the employer was desperate for anyone who didn't value their career too highly. I was only saved from it because I had C experience in school. It might have been a good scripting language if only people thought in RPN, but alas, we don't. One of the worst languages I've ever used, right down there with T-SQL and 4-D.

Re:FORTH

[tilante]

Forth (it's not an acronym - early versions wrote it in all caps just because the systems they were on didn't have lowercase) is still in use today, although cheap, powerful computing has made Linux and C move into a lot of the embedded systems niches where it used to be popular. It was briefly popular again on the Palm computers, thanks to the excellent implementation of a native Forth compiler (Quartus).

If you want software impact, though, it might be better to go with PostScript, which had syntax inspired by Forth - and essentially took over the printing world. Its descendant, Portable Document Format (PDF), has taken over the field of document transfer.

Re:FORTH

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sun Boot PROM ("OpenProm") - Sun's versin of the BIOS on PCs - was entirely a FORTH environment. You started up in the "ok " prompt, and off you went: 1 1 + .

It used to faze people on my training courses at Sun when they saw that, hey! The BIOS is a PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE!! And then you'd remind them that this wasn't unusual on most other systems - just PCs. Like, just about every micro did exactly that...

Re:FORTH

[hendrikboom]

If you tack proper static type checking onto a reverse polish language (I won't call it Forth. because with this it becomes a completely different beast), you get a surprisingly implementable and useful tool. Not that I don't prefer OCAML, though.

First game!

[Salamander]

Adventure, a.k.a. Colossal Cave, by Crowther and Woods (extended by others).

http://rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html

This was many old-school programmers' first exposure to computers as entertainment. For example, both my wife and I recall playing it on TI SilentWriters (paper output plus an acoustic modem) when we were kids. Even more than Space Wars, which was written at least a year later and only ran on much less common hardware, this was the start of computer gaming.

Re:First game!

[Old-Claimjumper]

Adventure, a.k.a. Colossal Cave, by Crowther and Woods (extended by others).

http://rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html

This was many old-school programmers' first exposure to computers as entertainment. For example, both my wife and I recall playing it on TI SilentWriters (paper output plus an acoustic modem) when we were kids. Even more than Space Wars, which was written at least a year later and only ran on much less common hardware, this was the start of computer gaming.

There is a more compelling reason beyond pure entertainment that speaks to the original question of relevance to computer science and software engineering.

I was an early player of Adventure on a PDP-10. At that time all software, even in languages like Fortran, were specific to a single architecture thorough non-standard libraries, internal use of architectural features, etc. Adventure was the FIRST system that was valuable enough (for whatever reasons) that it was ported to practically everything out there. It was neat at the time to be at some trade show, go to the Data General or Interdata booth and find Adventure running as a demo.

Today we take portability of Linux, Android, C or python or Perl programs, or practically anything else as a given. It is difficult for those not there at the time to appreciate just how different this was in a world of universal walled gardens. But at the time Adventure was unique and, I contend, worthy of study for just that reason.

Re:First game!

[Salamander]

Good point. In fact, what made me think of mentioning Adventure is that I'm hacking on Adventure 2.5 (a.k.a. 550) to make it playable with my daughter. I've already added code to work around one build error, modified some of the game logic having to do with save/restore annoyances, and found one crash if you "say" something too long. The point is that all of this is happening in Linux, based on code that was written well before Linux even existed. Surely there's a lesson there. Thanks for clarifying it.

Re:First game!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I agree with you that Colossal Cave is a fundamental building brick of gaming; it rocked for the time.

I want to take a second to throw a big wrench at what people today are calling "Interactive Fiction", because it is NOT Colossal Cave. IF is fundamentally different from TA - IF discards a lot of what Colossal Cave built. If you look at it from a contextual standpoint, Colossal Cave is the start of TA games, puzzles, the idea that you are using the instructions to command an avatar in the text world. IF is more recent branch that turned into essentially word-guessing novellas, where the novella is going to advance if you enter the right phrase. IF is about telling a specific story - puzzles are considered annoying, and "dark room" maps are considered painful.

tl;dr - Text adventures and Interactive Fiction are different things entirely. TA is text-based gaming, IF is text-based novella reading.

Early software

[Anonymous Coward]

Aldus pagemaker

Harvard Graphics and more...

[multimediavt]

The PowerPoint before PowerPoint. Of course, I hate PowerPoint, but Harvard Graphics had a large impact on PCs as presentation tools or presentation creation tools. We printed a lot of them on acetate and used the slides on overhead projectors back then.

Then there's things like Digital Darkroom (which became Photoshop), WordPerfect (not-WYSIWYG), QuarkExpress(WYSIWYG) and PageMaker (WYSIWYG) desktop publishing applications. QuickTime Player 1.0 and Video for Windows for desktop digital video pioneering, heck, throw in Adobe Premiere 1.0 or Avid 1.0. There are a ton of packages we still use today that were revolutionary or pioneering tools when they were wee 1.0 programs that fit on a few floppy disks!

Re:As an animator (Video Toaster Suite)

[toejam13]

Lightwave and the rest of the Video Toaster studio software was influential in that for the first time, you could have a quality video studio stuffed in a single computer. A lot of UHF and independent stations used 'em.

C compiler

[fyngyrz]

Most valuable program(s) ever. From day one, and still today. Hands down. Best positioned language in terms of "to-the-metal", changes from tool to uber-tool in the hands of anyone who masters assembler and arrives at learning C with that under their belt, can create extremely fast executables if the CPU is really taken into account, or can be extremely simple to implement if a CPU is treated simplistically -- yet your code will still work fine, if a bit more slowly. Made portability something achievable instead of just desired. C is so well positioned that implementing the language's constructs on top of [some random] CPU is a relatively simple exercise, and then you have immediate access to oodles of goodness.

Also the source of a lot of whining and bad programming from poor programmers. But hey, a fine carpentry set doesn't make you a great carpenter, either.

Also a nod out to standard libraries -- also a boon to portability and more.

C++, oC, C#... also worthy of nods, but C is the king.

Re:C compiler

[UsuallyReasonable]

I totally agree, and someone ought to mention Lattice C as important early software, so I will.

Re:C compiler

[Moondevil]

There were other kings before and there will be other kings afterwards. No kingdom lasts forever.

The king is dead, long live the king.

Re:C compiler

[peetm]

Indeed, one just has to ask C's detractors, "so, what is your language written in?"

MacWrite?

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy remembers MacWrite, but has somehow forgotten that it sucked?

Sure it had nice on-screen fonts, but it was painful to use compared to DOS word processors of the same era.

OSes and other things less remembered

[Cyrano de Maniac]

Although the following may not all be household names they were either pioneering or at least some of the first widely used software in their categories:

OS/360, TOPS, MULTICS, UNIX, and CP/M for operating systems.
NFS, NIS, LDAP, FTP, telnet, ssh, UUCP, talk, and IRC clients and servers for various aspects of networked computing.
SCCS, RCS, CVS, Bitkeeper, and git for revision control.
Gopher servers and clients as a prelude to web servers and browsers.
Napster and Bittorrent for file sharing.
Band In A Box, Finale, and Protools for various aspects of music production.
Archie as a precursor to web search engines.
The switching and accounting software behind the 5ESS switch and other major components of the global telephone system.
Compaq's clean-room reengineered BIOS.
Lots of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Space Shuttle control software.

I'm thankful to have lived in the age when most of the above were first developed and introduced.

Re:OSes and other things less remembered

[Lawrence_Bird]

TOPS-20 rocked.... until the batch job log spools filled up all the free disk..whoops!

Just start reading Byte

[Megane]

Byte is kind of the journal of note of the microcomputer era from 1975 to the early '90s (when it became just a bunch of boring reviews). I'm sure anyone who wanted a list of influential software from the past could spend a couple of weeks digging through them. You can find most of the early years as scanned .PDF files if you know where to look.

And don't forget to cover some of the important failures too, like The One[tm], Visi-On, and Lotus Jazz. And the important semi-failures like Smalltalk and OS/2.

Re:Just start reading Byte

[unixisc]

Right to the end (during its print edition, not its current online avatar), BYTE used to devote a good bit of the magazine to covering major hardware or software trends or standards. They came out with great articles on Y2K, Windows 95 and NT, and whenever new CPUs would come out from any of the major makers - be it Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IBM, DEC, HP, MIPS, Sun, et al, they would cover it pretty well. The only place where one would get a better description of the latter would be Microprocessor report, for those companies/schools that would afford the price.

The day BYTE closed down was one of the saddest I've ever experienced.

Re:Just start reading Byte

[Megane]

The Byte of the '90s was not the Byte of the early days. In '87 because of a change in tax laws, they offered a 6 years for $99 subscription renewal. After those six years were over, I felt no reason to renew again. At that point it was about little more than the latest version of Windows, or the latest x86 CPU, or the latest business software. Only Pournelle's column was still interesting.

Re:Just start reading Byte

[unixisc]

I was an occasional buyer during its last years, and a regular subscriber during its last one year. I would always look forward to Jon Udell and Tom Halfhill's articles. Online, byte.com had a bulletin board where they would discuss all sorts of technology trends and issues, and it was fun reading and discussing w/ them and other readers various things.

Doom

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom

KA9Q

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite was KA9Q. It was an early tcp/ip implementation of the protocol and was written to communicate over Ham radio links.

It was beautiful "C" code. Well structured and an excellent tutorial for nascent coders (I.E. me).

Hubert

If C compiler becomes the most valuable program ..

[Taco Cowboy]

... I'll nominate the punch cards as the most solid stack ever

MODEM7

[dogsbreath]

My first batch downloader
.
.
.

VSAS

[jtara]

Variation Simulation Analysis Software.

It's a technique for simulating variations in product assemblies. Usually mechanical, but could be of other natures, as well. You model the assembly and it's manufacturing variations, and then "build" some quantity of parts. One can determine how many assemblies will likely meet specifications, the major contributors to out-of-spec assemblies, etc. etc.

The technique was developed during WWII at Willow Run Labs, where it was implemented by the classic "banks of women operating calculators", and is one of the reasons we were able to crank-out all those airplanes that actually worked.

By the 70's it was implemented in an academic setting on mainframes.

A company I worked for obtained rights to VSAS and we ported it to the IBM PC. I did the initial port to Watcom Fortran (there's another one for you!), and then designed a domain-specific language (VSL) and implemented a compiler in C and interpreter in Fortran, so that mechanical engineers didn't have to write their models in Fortran any more. The Fortran models were bulky - with line after line of function calls with zillions of parameters, passing separate X,Y,Z values in the calls. I'd imagine the engineers wore-out the parenthesis keys on their keyboard pretty fast. VSL, on the other hand, had data types for points, lines, vectors, planes, etc. Using an interpreter didn't slow things down, because most of the time was spent in geometric library routines, which were in carefully-optimized Fortran.

I insisted on their hiring a mathematician, and between the two of us, we tweaked it to run faster on the PC than it did on the mainframe. (Engineering professors don't write code that is either fast or mathematically-correct, it turned out...)

And that's when it's use took off. The company founder started as a manufacturer's rep for some Finite Element Modelliing software, so had lots of contacts in the auto industry. (And the company was located near Detroit.) They both sold the software and did also did in-house projects for the auto companies until they ramped-up their own engineers. This allowed the auto makers, for example, to start treating windshields as structural elements (because the hole for the windshield could be manufacturered to precise tolerances), and allowed them to eliminate costly alignment operations, such as when fitting hoods.

It's used by every auto and aircraft manufacturer, every hard disk manufacturer, etc. etc. etc. Basically just about any complex mechanical product you touch was touched by VSAS during design.

I'd imagine you couldn't build an iPhone at an affordable cost or with the quality level of an iPhone without VSAS (or it's equivalent). You wouldn't be able to buy a terabyte hard drive for less than $100.

There's more info on it here:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/tecnomatix/quality_mgmt/variation_analyst/

(The company was acquired by Siemens many years ago.)

Maybe not quite what this post was looking for, which I think was more consumer PC software. But it runs on a PC and has from the beginning of PCs, and has had a large but mostly-invisible influence on just about every tech product we use every day.

A 30-year run is nothing to sniff at, either.

Apple Script

[renfrow]

I loved apple scripting, I used it to tie a multitude of programs together. I would use apple script to close the file I was in in LightSpeedC, open it up in MPW, format it the way I liked it with the gnu indent tool, save and close it, and reopen it in LSC. I wrote boatloads of this type of stuff integrating different programs together. I'm sad that it's an idea that never really took off :(.

Re:!Influential

[Spiked_Three]

Sorry the apple fan boys will mod you down. But, as one of the very few people who worked in software retail in the beginning, I know you are correct.

People came in and asked, "I want Visicalc, what computer should I buy?" It was 90% up to what we made the most profit on, as to what we would recommend. And the answer then was the same as today. We sold Commodore, Atari and Apple, Apple made the most profit. You had to buy a TRS-80 from Radio Shack.

Nothing in the Apples ever stood out as even slightly innovative. If they had been, Microsoft would not of had to bail them out of bankruptcy. The best they good do was "think different, because we don't have any other good reason to buy us".

But Computer Scientist do look backwards

[flabbergast]

Go look at a ray tracing paper or a photon mapping paper. It probably cites Kajiya's rendering equation paper from 1986. Thin plate spline registration? Bookstein from 1990. Its not software like MacPaint, but software is built on the back of research, so why focus on MacPaint when you can focus on the research? There's a mountain of literature out there, and CS definitely requires people to look backwards before moving forwards.

I'm sure I missed some

[Anonymous Coward]

FORTRAN I and Algol 60 compilers, LISP 1.5,, Eliza, BCPL, IBM OS/360, IBM ISAM, IBM VM/370, Adventure on PDP-10, RSX-11M, Wirth's Pascal and Modula, Unix Version 7, K&R C compiler, BSD Unix, Knuth's TeX and Metafont, Fran Allen's work on optimizing compilers, Smalltalk 80, Xerox Alto system, Postscript, Arpanet, TCP/IP, Mach kernel, Ingres database (and IBM System R), Apollo/Domain OS, X Windows System, NFS, NeXTSTEP, Visicalc, Standard ML (SML/NJ), Haskell (Glasgow ghc), Cfront C++ compiler, NCSA Mosaic, Patterson's work on RAID, Van Jacobsen's work on TCP/IP protocol stack

I met Michael Shrayer, author of Electric Pencil

[Futurepower(R)]

I was visiting a computer store owned by a friend. A man walked in who looked homeless. He wore clothes that everyone else I knew would have thrown away. This was in California before Reagan, before there were a lot of homeless people.

I quietly asked my friend if he would ask the homeless person to leave; maybe there would be a concern about theft. My friend laughed, "That's Michael Shrayer, he wrote Electric Pencil, he's a multi-millionaire".

Appleworks (for the Apple II)

[gslj]

AppleWorks put the basics (word processor, database, spreadsheet) into a sweet little integrated program. A ton of extensions and other modules came from third parties. (Hello, Beagle Bros!) so that you could do graphics MacPaint style, play with fonts, do page layout, etc. etc. It was a Apple's best-selling program, despite almost no marketing and development, well past the introduction of the Mac. All this, and ease of use. (Press "Esc" to get to the full-screen menus. Make a selection or press "Esc" to return to your work).

All integrated programs of the time, including Microsoft Works, ended up with "Works" in the name because of this program's success.

-Gareth

Re:Appleworks (for the Apple II)

[Kiaser Zohsay]

+1 for anything Beagle Brothers! Byte Zap earned me some ooohs and aaahs well into my college years.

Animals

[YesIAmAScript]

The Apple 2 learning expert system program.

Also, I'd say the dBase series of programs. Those and VisiCalc/Multiplan/Excel really made the name for micro computers in business.

Also Gutenberg, the text editor for the Apple 2 that did multiple fonts and "page layout" before anyone else was talking about that. It was super slow, but it was stepping in the desktop publishing direction that computers would later go in.

See here. Note the date, 1983. The Mac didn't even come out until 1984 and desktop publishing didn't really take flight until The Macintosh Office in 1985.

http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v9n6/64_Gutenberg.php

Also, maybe just for the lulz, but I think The Print Shop was a pretty big deal. You can write off banners and certificates as frivolous, but everyone used them. Suddenly customized banners and awards were not only possible but expected.

Pinball Construction Set

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Budge, FTW.

Re: Wordstar

[Anonymous Coward]

As a programmer working on CP/M, MP/M, CP/M-86 and MS-DOS 1 & 2, Wordstar was a godsend - it was available for all those OS's, and worked identically. The memory and disk (floppy and 5mb hard disks) was very small - couldn't have survived without it, especially compared to the "programmer" editors of the time.

Ben

The oldest things *I* recall ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of items suggested date from the fourth, fifth or even sixth generation of computing as though they were not reimplementations or extensions of items from earlier in the history of computing, reflecting increases in affordable capabilities.

dBASE

[Tablizer]

Yip! dBASE was an amazing product and still is. I wish I could find an interpreted OSS clone for some of my hobby projects.

Because the database is integrated into the language, there is less coding to translate between SQL-land and application-land, compared to the usual client/server or ODBC model. The closest current technology that compares is perhaps LINQ, but still not a full replacement.

It's granularity of querying was also smaller than SQL, allowing easier mixing of imperative and declarative programming and custom adjustments in-between processing stages.

It lacked some "big team project" features, which gave it a bad name, but for RAD, prototyping, and internal or hobby apps; it's hard to beat.

I hope a modernized version of it comes back.

Re:dBASE

[nospam007]

"I hope a modernized version of it comes back."

It still exists and all the old stuff still works albeit nowadays it's OO.
You can still do live stuff in the interpreter.

www.dbase.com

Re:dBASE

[Tablizer]

I meant a modernized version of the concepts, not the old language mixed with Java-style language constructs. That just turns it into Java, which makes it same-ol-same-ol. I want to expand or improve on what's unique about it.

The simple answer: All of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

While you guys debate over what software is "worth" preserving or recognizing, I'll be here with the rest of the community - at least the MAME and MESS developers - and our comfortable answer: Everything.

Re:The simple answer: All of it.

[Al Kossow]

That's what I do for a living
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/bit-by-bit-software-collecting/

why all post microcomputer?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about FORTRAN... no more writing stuff in assembler
Scientific Subroutine Library... no more coding up your own implementation of sin(x)
(and the idea of SHARE and DECUS, for instance)

Algol -> the ancestor of a whole raft of languages, Pascal, C, PL/I, etc. Pointers and heaps, and dynamic memory allocation in general.

Overlay loaders -> run software bigger than will fit in memory
Virtual memory and demand paging -> requiring hardware that supports it, but didn't require a priori memory allocation

TimeSharing in all of its initial forms

Applications wise
ECAP - electronic circuit analysis program- the predecessor of SPICE without which the modern semiconductor industry wouldn't have gotten where it is

XMODEM and its progeny (Kermit, etc.) allowing automated error free transmission of files over unreliable links (some previous poster mentioned CrossTalk, which was a fine user implementation).

RT-11 -> small machine single user OS with simple command handler which became the pattern for CP/M, etc.

BASIC (Darmouth TimeSharing System DTSS version, of course)

Re:If C compiler becomes the most valuable program

[fyngyrz]

Paper tape -- or perhaps piano rolls -- as the first reel software storage method.

vms

[Anonymous Coward]

and its spiritual successor's, winnt+...

Shakespeare?

[mypalmike]

"He has a computer science degree. Asking whether he knew about MacWrite and MacPaint, imho, is like asking a person with an English lit degree if he's heard of Shakerley Marmion."

FTFY

Microsoft BASIC in ROM

[kenh]

While the first 4K Microsoft BASIC was significant in many ways, the ROM-based Microsoft BASIC included with literally tens of millions of computers shaped the industry in ways no other application ever did.

It's impact was in being the first tool used by an entire generation of programmers, it shaped their thinking in ways that frustrated some.

PLATO

[stox]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

A remarkable number of innovations in one system. Supposedly the inspiration for the Xerox STAR system. Graphic displays in the 1960's. Real time chat rooms and instant messaging. Computer Aided Instruction. This list goes on and on.

CBBS and XMODEM

[stox]

The first BBS, and the protocol that enabled the transfer of binary files over modem. Xmodem was originally invented for use on CBBS and spread from there.

Re:CBBS and XMODEM

[Anonymous Coward]

First taste of networked computing for many.

Re:CBBS and XMODEM

[oz_paulb]

BYE - CP/M BBS host software

Re:CBBS and XMODEM

[mbstone]

There was also RBBS-PC, adapted for the IBM-PC by the members of the Capital PC User Group.

Back then we signed onto our favorite BBSes using PC-TALK, the first app marketed as Shareware, it was open source (IBM-PC BASIC) and Andy Fluegelman, the guy who released it, made tons of money before being diagnosed with cancer and disappearing near the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A popular commercial BBS app was Wayne Bell's , which was expanded circa 1988 into a network of WWIV BBSes known as WWIVNet.

A Spreadsheet in 1968

[Bob Munck]

One of the first hypertext processors, a WYSIWYG text system written at Brown U. in 1967-1969, had a feature called an Electric Blackboard that allowed the user to build tables of numbers with various kinds of automatic summing/averaging of the rows and columns. You could select an individual entry with the light pen (IBM 2250), change it, and the calculated entries would automatically update. I've heard that this feature was used to establish prior art when VisiCalc and SuperCalc were duking it out in court a decade later. The feature used the expression evaluation engine from the BRUIN language, an interactive language interpreter also developed at Brown.

One of the undergraduates working on the project was Bob Wallace, later an early employee of Microsoft and developer of PC-Write and the concept of shareware.

Re:A Spreadsheet in 1968

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yeah - loved PC-Write back in the day. Think I still have some diskettes for running it on a DOS PC (no DOS PC, active, but I still have installation diskettes for various versions - ought to see if they can still be read, if I have anything to read them with...).

Golden Oldies

[anorlunda]

IBM's FORTRAN compiler, ditto COBOL.

Eliza, the fake psychiatrist.

Texas Instrument's Speak and Spell

Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple ][

On board control software for Apollo 11, ditto for the Voyager space probes.

MIT's Multics O.S.

The Xerox Star office workstation

OS360

Unix and C compiler

Dartmouth Basic

General Electric's time sharing O.S.

Re:Golden Oldies

[drinkypoo]

I was surprised I had to read down so far to see UNIX. UNIX and C dramatically transformed OS programming and development and even did it for the better.

Re:Golden Oldies

[anorlunda]

I didn't mean to list them in any particular order.

However, I believe that Multics deeply influenced all following O.S.s including Unix. Simply trace the careers of the MIT students who worked on Multics to trace the influence. It was not so much that Multics design was great, but that the students learned the ins/outs pros/cons difficulties/benefits and obstacles to O.S. design.

Re:Golden Oldies

[Anonymous Coward]

> Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple ][

I remember jumping out of my skin first time I played this and the guard comes into the room and shouts "SS" at me. Totally amazing feat of programming given the only way you could get a sound out of the Apple ][ was by writing to a specific memory location, with precise timing to get different frequencies. Speech was just .... awesome !

Re:Under-appreciated: VM, OS/2, COBOL

[Anonymous Coward]

VM/370 (aka VM/SP, VM/CMS, VM/XA, VM/ESA, zVM) - the mainframe inspiration for VMware. Working with those were the REXX scripting language (great background for my current heavy use of ksh for web server admin/monitoring tools), and Xedit for very sophisticated text editing (of REXX programs among others). I even wrote a spreadsheet program with REXX/Xedit (and a colleague blew that away with a far better implementation). OS/2 "borrowed" REXX from VM/CMS.

Oh, yeah, OS/2 Warp - loved that object-oriented WorkPlace Shell (and Jean-Luc Picard's commercials ;-). Too bad IBM wanted Win95 for their PC's, so MS had the leverage to extort them into letting OS/2 fade away. Interestingly, it is still in use in various business functions such as the NYC Subway's Metrocard system - http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/3/. That article reminded me of our "Team OS/2" zealotry - guess that zeal has transferred to Linux and Mac-iOS fanbois still fighting MS.

Also, let's not forget COBOL, the overutilized commercial programming language. It was the "child" of Navy Commander (later Admiral?) Grace Hopper designed originally in the 60's to be a common application programming language for all US gov IT suppliers ("FIPS"), and which I learned and programmed back in the early-to-late 70's (compiled from 80-column Hollerith - aka "punch" - cards input, code listings printed on 132-column "greenbar" output). It is still in use today for mainframe business applications programs (although many instances may be unchanged from their 70's implementations - aside from Y2K fixes to the date PIC(ture) declaratives). I don't miss it a bit, but there it was, and is...

Re:"Jumpman" (c64), Archon, & "Barbarian" (Ami

[BasilBrush]

Jumpman looks like it was a Donkey Kong and Space Panic derivative.

And Barbarian came after lots of similar PvP fighting-games.

All hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about that. Sure in might have been implemented purely in hardware but who cares. Most computer hardware starts out as pseudo-code and from there is implemented as the actual hardware. If you dig deep enough, you will find something like software design. Hardware designers have a library of chips to work with while software designers have a library of routines to work with.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say that not a single or multi-enabled program, i.e. software, is worthy of any acclaim.

After all.

The Toilet for example.

Depends on Toilet Paper, to an enormous effect. Thus the trees of the worlds rain forests fall to the chainsaw to alleviate the health problems of cities.

XD

Lisa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seven applications with a unified GUI, ie: cut and paste between apps, one set of fonts etc.
word processing, painting, drawing, terminal, spreadsheet, graphing, project management.
In 1982!

Re:Pre internet, you bought a computer to make thi

[DerekLyons]

Before the internet, PC's were a tool and not just a screen to get you to what someone else already had made. You got a PC because you wanted to make things.

TFTFY - you're not the first person to confuse PC's and computers.
 

All you could consume on computers in the pre-internet age were games

So actually what you meant - "before the internet you bought a PC to make stuff, unless you wanted to play games"... But, that's not really true. Long before the internet you could buy things like recipe databases, etc... (And though you dismiss them, people did buy PC's form game - by the truckload.)
 

Computers were mainly purchased by those who wanted to use them as a tool for creative and practical purposes.

  You've also forgotten databases, and spreadsheets, and accounting programs.... and truckloads of other 'tool' software.
 
You either didn't actually live through the pre-internet PC days, or you're remembering a golden age that never actually existed.

Chip's Challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

nuff said

emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

emacs

Are we counting games?

[theRunicBard]

If yes: Diablo I and Rogue. Past that, emacs and vim. I suppose vim implies vi.

Avid Media Suite Pro

[FairAndUnbalanced]

Avid Media Suite Pro (circa 1993) was, imho, the first combination of hardware/software that made it truly easy to stick a board in a PC (well, a Macintosh IIfx) and edit full-frame video in the style of real-time non-linear editing. The experience was just like using a word processor for text or photoshop for images -- a fluid editing experience with simple cut and paste of video and audio. You could also easily injest and output your video from tape. To get up and running, you simply plugged the Nubus board into the IIfx and loaded the software. Although Avid shipped the Avid/1 in 1988, and Adobe shipped Adobe Premiere 1.0 in 1991, I think Avid's Media Suite Pro set the original bar for accessible prosumer video editing.

It's a simplist compiler, that's why

[Anonymous Coward]

It was fast because the compiler was written in assembler and because the language, Pascal, forces the coder into ordering things for the compiler so it can one-shot the effort.

Nothing particularly great about that if you ask me. C compiler written in C is much more impressive in my book, anybody can code a compiler in assembly (before C came along, that was how all compilers were written for a new platform)

Here's What I Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

The British had a few notable successes with code-breaking.

Computer-controlled anti-aircraft guns defeated the V1 flying bomb.

Computer-generated actuarial tables from Mutual Benefit in 1948 became the sine qua non of life insurance.

A computer successfully analyzed the US 1952 election on TV.

The original Leo computer was able to greatly improve the operations of a chain of tea bars back in the 1950's.

There was some real heavy-duty numerical programming done to get nuclear reactors into submarines as part of RIckover's project.

IBM's IMS database was a big part of Project Apollo.

Lots of the early airline systems were horrible, but AA came up with a good one.

MIT had a successful symbolic math program called formac or project mac pretty early.

Lisp started playing with blocks and everyone thought that AI was just around the corner.

All the stuff that has landed out on Mars starting in the 1970's has done it under computer control, programmed in everything from BASIC to Lisp.

The entire science of economics would be lost without computers. It's still lost, but with computers at least nobody trusts it.

Lisp and FORTAN

[bcrowell]

FORTAN: 1957

Lisp: 1958

Lisp was such a good idea that people are still reimplementing it 55 years later.

FORTAN was such a piece of crap that ... almost everyone started using it, it became for most people the only possible way to learn to program, it persisted for decades after alternatives were designed, it was sufficiently flexible to evolve into a very nice and usable modern version, it's still often more efficient than C, and it basically defined the whole procedural style of programming.

Re:Lisp and FORTAN

[Anonymous Coward]

It's FORTRAN, not FORTAN.

Re:Lisp and FORTAN

[Anonymous Coward]

FORTRAN is still alive and well. Every major compiler vendor includes it and it's faster than C for many numeric tasks.

Re:Lisp and FORTAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Misspelled three times. What's wrong with you?

Re:Lisp and FORTAN

[Anonymous Coward]

MAD --- Michigan Algorithm Decoder. A language that predate FORTRAN but was much more powerful in many ways (it had overloaded operators that one could code in MAD or assembly language, etc.). In the 60's, I had a consulting job involving a statistical system written in MAD and we had a messenger service get us a MAD manual. Instead, he brought a MAD Annual (i.e. annual edition of MAD magizine). Despite this setback, I was able to do quite a bit of work in this language.

Re:Lisp and FORTAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortran was not a "piece of crap," it was one of the first attempts to provide a languanguage that people could program in without resorting to assembler. Fortran was built with so many optimizations from the word "go" because it was competing against hand-crafted assembler. My favorite quote about fortran: "I don't know what language scientists will be programming in in 20 years, but I know it will be called Fortran."

Lisp was the first language to begin with a definition of the results.

Finder

[manu0601]

What else?

not written here

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I didnt write the software, it never existed and isn't worth mentioning.

Trumpet Winsock

[hockpatooie]

Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.1.

A small, nearly forgotten utility, but the one that opened the door of the internet for many.

In the same category, I might also mention Slirp, which I and many others used to suck full web access through our university shell accounts. Ah, the memories.

Moving 15,000+ workforce from typewriters to PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite a few years ago, around 1984-85, I had the unfortunate experience to be involved in transitioning a large workforce (15,000+) into the 20th century.
I literally pried IBM Selectric and Underwood typewriters out from the hands of many pre-baby boomers and replace them with the new IBM Personal Computer (PC).
One of the products that was instrumental in winning this tough crowd over was a series called "PFS". There was a PFS: Write, a PFS: File, and a PFS: Calc. I am not sure if I remember a PowerPoint (presentation package equivalent) in their series. These were a dead simple, almost idiot proof, stand-alone applications that performed everyday tasks. I remember PFS: Write being the "ice breaker" for most of my clients. As soon as I demonstrated the "spelling check" feature in the word processor the product sold itself. IBM, of course, tried to bundle their "DisplayWriter" product with the PC purchased. I don't know if anyone remembers DisplayWriter, it was truly one of the most "user un-friendly" products ever produced. Later on the same company (PFS) offered their word processor, database and spreadsheet programs under one larger application that you could jump from one stand-alone program to the other without closing any of the others, almost multi-tasking.

A few...

[Shaman]

Sorry if this duplicates.

Test Drive - the first really somewhat sort of kind of accurate driving game.

Beachhead - the first game that anyone I know thinks was really good for a PC

Corel Draw - how the mighty have fallen. This was the first vector drawing program with real chutzpa and it came with scads of free-ish clip art.

Wordperfect - another fallen giant, this was the first word processor that had real formatting and usefulness. Today it's still better than Word. ;)

Pagestream - launched the Atari ST as a business platform and sold probably a half million machines. Still available and still powerful today! It blows software like Scribus out of the water but it's not open source. :(

EMACS - the text editor that is its own operating system.

Solitaire - c'mon, this program has been around for two decades and is STILL the most popular Windows program.

TCP/IP - do I really need to say it?

QNX - still possibly the most popular real-time operating system. I first used it on the Bionic Beavers in Ontario back in (IIRC) 1984.

Eye of the Beholder - the game that made both FPS and adventuring cool.

I know there are lot more. My memory is getting pretty old like the rest of me... there were some games on the C=64 that are still not being reproduced today, one of which I remember as being a game in which you built a robotic factory rig that would deliver a payload through a processing system and then produce an end product, and had hundreds of level variations - one of my favourites, cannot remember the name but nothing like it exists today that I have seen.

Re:A few...

[mattack2]

Beachhead - the first game that anyone I know thinks was really good for a PC

According to Wikipedia, that game came out in 1983. (They also don't list Apple II, so maybe I only played the sequel.)

Anyway, Lode Runner also came out in 1983. You don't think that's fun/good? Choplifter came out in 1982. I think both Choplifter & Lode Runner deserve to be on the list.. Not that they're necessarily my favorites, but that they're iconic. (I'm still amazed at how "realistic" the running people are that are just a blob of white pixels.)

CS

[Capt.Albatross]

"CS is not about software development, it is a branch of mathematics."

That depends entirely on what college or university you are attending.

Computer science has a meaning for more than just students, and that meaning lies primarily within the domain of mathematics. What gets taught in the name of computer science depends on the institution doing the teaching.

Re:CS

[gr8_phk]

Computer science has a meaning for more than just students, and that meaning lies primarily within the domain of mathematics. What gets taught in the name of computer science depends on the institution doing the teaching.

To some extent I feel like the mathematicians are trying to make themselves more important by claiming some new territory. There is plenty of overlap between what I consider (IMHO) computer science and math. Turing machines, computability, automata. Those are all mathematical concepts that have loose relevance in the real world of computers. You can argue their importance, but nobody actually uses Turing machines outside their analysis - I still consider that mathematics. Likewise, math has given us great things like public key encryption, which I still consider math. Mathematics has given us the framework for 3D computer graphics which is an interesting thing, not sure what to call it - I'm sure the "mathematicians" consider it basic analytic geometry - they may perk up a little if you claim to use quaternions which were a purely mathematical construct prior to their practical application in graphics.

If you want to claim those abstract mathematical concepts are the foundation of computing, go ahead, but you're not doing society any favors. We use real processors and write real software to solve real problems. Give me an analysis of the differences between x86, ARM, and the JVM that goes beyond "they are all turing complete" and you might find less resistance to claiming computer science is math.

There is plenty of overlap, but IMHO CS isn't really math. It's like the old cartoon where psychology is really biology, is really chemistry, is really physics, which is really math. When you think like that, everything is math. But that's only how mathematicians think.

Where I went to college, CS was taught within the department of engineering and computer science. Mathematics was a different area - although the computer graphics courses were taught in the math building by a math professor. Most CS was over in engineering.

Re:CS

[Capt.Albatross]

Ultimately, you are right - it is a losing position to argue that a word means something other than what common usage has chosen for it to mean.

'Computer science' has always been a misleading term, because whatever it is, it is not science. As it is taught, computer science resembles a branch of engineering more than anything else. We have something that calls itself software engineering, but that field looks more like a branch of business management, and one, furthermore, that is predicated on the mistaken idea that creating software is a form of manufacturing where success is guaranteed if we would only run it like a production line.

The field of computing seems to have a problem in finding appropriate suffixes.

Re:CS

[Jane Q. Public]

"Ultimately, you are right - it is a losing position to argue that a word means something other than what common usage has chosen for it to mean."

I am not sure I agree. At least in some circumstances. It depends on the context.

For example: dictionaries generally describe common usage. But the common usage of words like "paranoia" and "schizophrenia", for a couple of examples, only slightly resemble the technical meanings of the terms. So a dictionary might be of no help deciding who is correct, if one person is using the technical meaning and another person is using the common meaning. In such disputes, an encyclopedia or textbook may be the more appropriate authority.

Other areas where this happens frequently are hard science and law. Even a simple word like "contract" has a technical (legal) meaning that differs from what many people mean when they say "contract".

This has been a persistent problem with, for another example, the perception of what is meant by the wording of the U.S. Constitution. The founders themselves wrote that it should be interpreted according to the original intent of the writers, not according to common usage which changes over time.



---
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson

Re:CS

[jknapka]

I took a course on human/computer interaction last year, and in that course it became clear to me that there is a significant empirical scientific aspect to software development, though this may not be widely recognized as a distinctly separate thing from the main "engineering" aspect. So I'd say there are three streams within "CS":

1. The theory part, which really is a branch of mathematics. Automata, complexity, compressibility, etc.
2. The software-development part, which is an art that aspires to become a branch of engineering. (Yes, you can study and quantify and measurably improve the outcomes of a development process, so there is an empirical element here, also. But most software development as practiced is, I would guess, more art than science. Organizations that I've been involved in that actively pursue things like SEI levelling seem to lose interest after a while.)
3. The human/computer interaction part, which is an empirical science in its infancy that has overlap with cognitive science and psychology.

No list would be complete without...

[Anonymous Coward]

...World of Warcraft!

Gaming. All the rest is ubergeek.

[yusing]

What a bunch of geeks. Not GUIs, not number crunchers, not "desktops" or "workstations" or "tools".

From the users POV: Leather Goddesses of Phobos is what got the juices flowing. And Mountain Dew.

Re:Gaming. All the rest is ubergeek.

[hendrikboom]

in LGoP how *do* you get out of the locked-in startup area? :-)

Starting List

[Murdoch5]

Unix, C, An Assembler, X, C++, WIndows ( Only the original ), The first terminal etc...

The early web...

[Phics]

What about NCSA Mosaic? I still remember the first time I accessed the Internet without telnet or FTP... The 'web' may not have been just a piece of software, and this certainly wasn't the first web browser, but it is really the browser that introduced the world wide web to the masses... and one can trace it's lineage straight through to Firefox.

Great software that died a proprietary death

[beachdog]

What early great software programs have died or buried in the proprietary cemetary?

At the top of my list of "never escaped" is AutoCad and it's family of file formats that are still proprietary. I feel this is a real loss to the whole world that this important suite of file formats and set of command and control conventions continues to be expensive and closed.

For "almost escaped" I would place Turbo Pascal and a pair of books by Nicolas Wirth. I used Turbo Pascal for a fun self education in data structures and linked lists. Then it withered with high prices and lack of a free library movement.

Another "almost escaped" program is Dbase II and Dbase III+. The latter program had several outstanding reference and guide books. But there has never appeared a free or open source database interpreter (afaik) I quit looking years ago. These days I just grep a subdirectory to find things.

Finally on my list of great ideas that have never escaped the proprietary clinch is the HP3000 Image database file system and the amazing elegant Cognos Powerhouse report language. Image could do a whole bunch of indexing and searching forwards and backwards and it had super duper business security and permissions. The Powerhouse report language could throw together the equivalent of a tedious and patiently developed SQL query in a way I can best describe as elegant and intuitive. The last I saw of Cognos Powerhouse was a 3 month old non-resellable $30,000 cardboard box of tape reels I handed to the president of the company as a merger-liquidation was finally winding up.

Re:Great software that died a proprietary death

[tilante]

If you're looking for something free to work with Dbase III+ files, try Visual Foxpro (version 9.0 is freely downloadable from MS) on Windows or DollyBase on Mac. Or look at the xBase (the generic term for dBase-compatibles) article on Wikipedia.

Network OS

[Diagoras of Melos]

Let's not forget the importance of the NOS, which enabled ad hoc collaboration in the age of the overbearing mainframe. NOS was and is a force multiplier. The best, most forward looking was probably Banyan Vines, which had a complete and stable directory structure more than a decade before Novell and Microsoft. It suffered for lack of application support, shut out by Microsoft hegemony. That's also what killed Novell in the end.

Dungeons of Daggorath

[Spugglefink]

Dungeons of Daggorath was extremely groundbreaking for its time. I recently dug up and played a Linux port of this classic, and even though the user interface is spectacularly bad, and the graphics awful, it can still suck me back to 1982 and make my heart race.

CLANK! Oh no, I better get ready to type like my life depended on it!! One of those knights is about to kick my ass!

PKZip?

[xtal]

Major impact. Patent battles. Still used today.

Confusing as hell command line switches to create an archive. What more do you want?

Re:PKZip?

[gsslay]

Vote for PKZip! Back in the day when you transferred everything by 720K floppy PKZip was invaluable, and knowing your command switches was an art you needed to master.

But seriously, where does Dave Winer get the idea that MacWrite and MacPaint are essential info for today's coder? He just sounds like some ancient complaining about how youngsters today have never heard of Bob Dylan. It's not as if it's critical information. Yes, they were remarkable in their day. But it's history now. Unless you're a technology historian they're old news of very limited relevance.

IBM PC Basica

[Anonymous Coward]

I made up my first program in Basica in 1985. Being an accountant, the ability to sort and extract data fascinated me and pushed my career in a different direction from that of a "bean counter"

Re:IBM PC Basica

[Clived]

Guess I should have logged in before pasting that ..:P

Re:IBM PC Basica

[gsslay]

Back to bean counting for you!

Re:I met Michael Shrayer, author of Electric Penci

[calidoscope]

I was visiting a computer store owned by a friend. A man walked in who looked homeless. He wore clothes that everyone else I knew would have thrown away. This was in California before Reagan, before there were a lot of homeless people.

Reagan was the Governor from early 1967 to early 1975, and I doubt that Electric Pencil even came out before 1975. My guess the scene you described happened in Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown's first year of office.

Jerry Pournelle's first though when seeing Electric Pencil for the first time was that he would never have to retype another page again. The breakthrough with Electric Pencil was that it would run on "low cost" hardware, the magnetic tape typewriter provided similar functionality in the 1960's for about 10k$, or about the same as the base price for a Cessna 172.

And before 1980...

[Anonymous Coward]

PUB desk-top publishing of journal articles in early 1970s.

TVEDIT CRT text editing in 1960s.

PUFFT, "The Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator", Saul Rosen et al, CACM 8(11):661-666 (Nov 1965). Fast Fortran compiler and runtime for IBM 7090/7094 (32K 36-bit words of RAM)

SOAP for IBM 650 Symbolic Optimizing Asembly Program, 1955.

Art Samuel's checkers programs 1950s The first self-learning program; alpha-beta search.

Re:Pre internet, you bought a computer to make thi

[Shaman]

I scoured my brain and just couldn't come up with Print Shop. We (kind of) need another program like that today. I know of none.

Deluxe Paint was awesome on my a1000 back in 1987. ;)

Doom and Quake

[ixvo]

I'm baffled that no one mentioned Doom and Quake yet.

Doesn't anyone remember how for years the games that are now known as FPS were called doom-like or quake-like?

PC Write

[Anonymous Coward]

PC Write the first word processor for many people. Bargain shareware has power of high priced competition back in the days when Seagate 20 MB drives cost $365.

Re:PC Write

[taiwanjohn]

Back when nobody I knew even HAD a hard drive. PC-Write was a mainstay of the floppy-only era, favored for its light footprint and snappy responsiveness. If I remember right, the executable was around 32kb, which meant it would load off of a 5.25" floppy in just a few seconds.

I remember when "consumer" HDDs hit the market, and a friend of mine saw one in action for the first time. He described its speed in terms of PC-Write: "You know how when you load PC-Write, the disk whirs for a couple of seconds, and then it opens? Well, with a hard disk, you hit 'ENTER' and the hard disk goes 'zzzt!' and then 'pow!' it's loaded. Amazing!"

Considering the current state of "bloatware", one might say we've gone backwards since then. (sigh!) Time to get an SSD...

BBS's, MUDS,

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know who wrote the original software, but very much remember using them back in the late 80's. They were the precursors to all we have today in the web

UNIX =

[balise]

The Unix Operating System, version 7. That's what came after
punch cards, for me, and I still use the basic lingo in Linux today.
Everything followed Unix, and it is still alive here and there.

Movie BYU

[Required Snark]

MovieBYU was a very early (pre 1980) 3D rendering program from Brigham Young University in Utah. It was written in Fortran, which was the only portable language for high performance computing at that time. It was state of the art as well. The algorithm used scan line rendering, and all the surfaces were built out of polygons.

You could buy the source code on a nine track tape. If I remember correctly the cost was under $2000, If you wanted to see how a real rendering program worked, this was the best thing available.

It was also an early example of Open Source software. There were no restrictions on what you could do once you bought a copy. It could by modified and run on as many machines were available, but not resold or given to other organizations.

The availability of MovieBYU was very important in the growth of computer graphics. It was the basis of software used in the 1980's for feature film CGI work.

Re:Movie BYU

[mattack2]

It was also an early example of Open Source software. There were no restrictions on what you could do once you bought a copy. It could by modified and run on as many machines were available, but not resold or given to other organizations.

Umm, it seems to me like your last sentence means that it absolutely is NOT open source, especially not "Open Source". Just because you get the source code, and can use/change it on your own systems, doesn't mean that something is open source.

Doom

[miroku000]

I think Doom was one of the more influential pieces of software.

Atari TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

1st Word Plus on the Atari STe

Re:Atari TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Steinberg Jones' Pro-24 now Cubase
Logic Notator now Apples Logic Audio.

Two of the most prominent applications running on a computer designed for midi serial communications and synchronising for audio tape systems. The heart of the big music studios. The ATARI was a crucial piece of equipment for holding together midi drum machines, samplers and keyboards for sync with audio and indeed film as well as Lighting.The aforementioned applications helped create some of the biggest genres in music eg Techno, Hip-hop and popular Rock&Pop.

Sure we have ableton and pro tools but we have yet to have these developers get together with a computer manufacturer to make something specifically for music production. So far as I know Steinberg had done with Atari. Because the PC and the predominant OS is a load of crap!. Thus far have yet to see something as reliable.

Ed/Edlin

[Lodragandraoidh]

I started using edlin to do file editing on Microsoft DOS back in the day. I found out sometime later in college that it was a copy of the Unix line editor 'ed' which vi (vim) is a wrapper around. All those painful line editing commands were actually useful when I would accidentally escape vi and end up in raw ed mode.

Re:Agreed, 110% + more... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Informative post. Why's it downmoderated?

Easywriter

[donweel]

From Cap'n software, original wordprocessor for Apple ][ written in Forth by the notorious Captain Crunch. I did my term paper in this program, it was I think one of the first wordprocessors available for personal computers.

Notation, not concept

[Roger W Moore]

Roman numerals are obsolete. Unless you live in clockwork world.

Roman numerals are notation and, as the OP says, notation changes but the core is still the same. We still use the concept of numbers but we use a different notation to express them.

Re:well CS IS NOT IT / NETWORKING / DESKTOP / SEVE

[Shoten]

well CS IS NOT IT / NETWORKING / DESKTOP / SEVERS.

And this why that needs to be in a tech schools.

CS is not IT, or Networking? Um...who do you think developed AD? A person who studied metallurgy?

P.I.E.

[mattr]

Apple P.I.E. (Programmer's Interactive Editor). I wish I could find it somewhere.
  google can't understand: "apple p.i.e." "apple ][" software
  was it harvard software? I think it came in a faux-leather binder
Wang style dedicated word processing hardware.. WriteRoom looks a little like it.. darn my copy seems to have expired.

Edlin

[flyingfsck]

Nothing did more to frustrate programmers than Edlin.

Visicalc by far

[strangeattraction]

I sold computers retail before and after Visicalc. By far the most important program I have ever seen. The computers began to sell themselves. MBA's from Philip Morris would put Apple ]['s in their tobacco sheds running Visicalc. They would bring them back to me with Tobacco dust in in them for maintenance. The program opened up the use of computers to an entirely new class of users. I have not seen that kind of innovation since.

BoeingCalc

[Hadlock]

BoeingCalc was the first spreadsheet that had worksheets that were interconnected. The user interface was terrible (terrible) but if you're an excel wizard, you'll have a rough idea of what you're looking at. The very first version supported files up to 32mb in size. In 1982! Imagine that. I actually "inherited" a copy of BoeingCalc on old 5 1/2" floppies, but they're so old I wasn't able to retrieve the files (only the directory listing) off them, and as far as I know I'm the only amateur computer historian with a (possibly) functional copy/physical disk of the stuff.
 
If anyone is able to help/assist, my website and boeingcalc info is in my sig below.

Teco

[Lawrence_Bird]

but thats way way before most of your times....

Dartmouth Basic

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic was influential, but Joss, the Johnniac symbolic system, was better and much more deserving of fame!

How's this for notable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Harry Markowitz invented Simscript (a very early sort-of OO programming language) and also won a Nobel Prize. Has anyone else both won a Nobel prize and written any widely used software?

Sketchpad

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

The forerunner of CAD; it even had constraints like "keep these lines parallel".

Atari Star Raiders

[meehawl]

There, that was easy.

and what about

[Anonymous Coward]

everything in VMS, like .. clustering, phone (instant messaging).

the world's first relational database:oracle (dbase wasn't relational until about 1990), which was also the first to use SQL

ibm who gave us SQL

How better to be forward-looking

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Than to know what a groundbreaking innovation looks like and how it leverages what came before.

VisiCalc Saved Apple

[Tablizer]

VisiCalc may have saved Apple. The Apple II was expensive compared to competitors, meaning it risked losing having enough market-share to have industry support, and it was going to take a lot of money to get the then nascent Lisa/Mac platforms working.

Dan Bricklan was looking for a microcomputer platform to put his new invention on. One story is that the Commodore Pet and TRS-80's were all booked up, leaving the Apple available for programming.

Another is that S. Jobs offered them a hardware discount if they ported MicroChess, their first product, to Apple next in line. Little did Jobs know that VisiCalc would be a huge hit.

Either way, without the sales of VisiCalc, Apple may not have had enough steam to survive the long and difficult path to the Mac.

Provided you had a wodge of BluTak

[Anonymous Coward]

To stop the 16K ram from wobbling and interrupting the rampaging dinosaur!

Classic days....

Re:Provided you had a wodge of BluTak

[RDW]

I was the proud owner of a 3rd party (Memotech) low profile RAM pack, bought at WH Smith. No Blu-Tack required!:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadkenny/4002315512/
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/physical-object/2005/04/102642093.01.01.lg.jpg
http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/showmag.php?mag=SinclairUser/Issue002/Pages/SinclairUser00200009.jpg

MultiPlan on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Produced? You mean the the UNIX Microsoft licensed from AT&T Corporation.

Quick history summary:
1977 - Apple II
1979 - VisiCalc on Apple II
1980 - Microsoft Xenix
1982 - Microsoft Multiplan on CP/M etc

Re:MultiPlan on...

[Bing Tsher E]

You mean the the UNIX Microsoft licensed from AT&T Corporation.

Yes, the UNIX that Microsoft ported to the 8086 processor. My Altos box supports 5 users on serial consoles on an 8086 processor with 512M of RAM. Not anything anywhere near as impressive than UNIX on a PDP-11 but not to bad, either.

Visicalc made the Apple II, actually. It was the first and only platform Visicalc would run on for quite some time. Businessmen would go into the computer store and ask to "buy a Viscalc." The fact that they had to buy an Apple II at the same time was incidental in their minds.

My father bought Visicalc for his first generation IBM PC, which ran PC-DOS 1.0. By that point (1982) that was what people wanted.

MacWrite started popular wysiwyg editors...

[HuguesT]

...and what a nightmare they unleashed upon the world. As an ignorant undergrad student I wrote once an important letter with it, using at least 3 different fonts in a single page. I thought it look good but it didn't have the intended effect. It lacked class and was not professional looking.

Wysiwyg editors let you focus on the appearance instead of the content, and what's more they do not necessarily let you adjust the appearance in a consistent manner. MacWrite certainly didn't have styles. I only learned about various professional compositing software in grad school, including TeX.

Steve Jobs famously took typography courses at college. He should also have taken compositing classes as well, and perhaps we would now have Word with better styles control.

Rendering My Youth

[andersh]

I remember using POV-Ray as a young boy, I believe it came with a magazine, and I found the rendering process absolutely fascinating!

I don't think my friends quite understood my interest, then again my father and brother had already introduced me to CP/M, DOS, Windows, Pascal, BASIC and so on by this time. The family computer was even upgraded to a 286! It would take hours to render any new drawing, but it was wonderful!

Dr. Halo

[mbstone]

It was horrendously named (it was thought that Digital Research's DR Draw was its competition), and even more horrendously marketed, but this 1984 PC-DOS app was the first color paint app for the IBM-PC, it even predated any color paint app for Macs.

Hello Emacs!

[andersh]

Thanks, now, that's a seminal piece of software I didn't know about! I should ask my father about it since he once worked on PDP's.

Other Fine Adventures

[Anonymous Coward]

Space Quest and King's Quest!

Software the masses started on

[WinstonWolfIT]

I was a business consultant back when the XT came out. As I literally watched business move from 3x5 card boxes and standalone computers into massive multi-million$$ concerns, I would like to present the best of breed from back in the XT/AT days.

Lotus 123 - Accountants
Wordperfect - Especially attorneys
Desqview - Power users
Novell - Networks
Great Plains - Accounting
Compaq Dos 3.31 - The first DOS that didn't suck

Clippy

[Anonymous Coward]

.. for positive acclaim:
* doom
* pctools
* mg (cga emulator on hercules), if anyone has info on how they made this, please let me know.
* leisure suit larry
* tc2.0
* pine
* netscape 3
* ncftp
* zsh

Pong

[mwvdlee]

Pong.
Imagine what the world would be like now, if nobody ever thought of using a computer to play a game.

Business apps and OS' s may have popularized computers as a business tool.
Games popularized computers as something you'd want inside your home.

copy/paste

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know which program had copy/paste first.
But imagine the billions of man-years it has saved since its invention...

Easy Flow

[Big Hairy Ian]

If only for the EULA "Release the killer laser sharks!" :)

M.U.L.E. and Ultima 3

[Kergan]

M.U.L.E., for all its descendants in the simulation genre, chief among them Civilization. Not that M.U.L.E. was the very very first, since Burten had written an economic simulation game prior to that, but it certainly popularized the genre.

Ultima III also comes to mind, for CRPGs. Best I'm aware, it was the first with a modern, graphical interface.

CP/M

[PacRim Jim]

Gary Kildall's CP/M family of operating systems, which bootstrapped the whole PC industry.

SCO Unix

[nuckfuts]

Just had to throw that out there :)

subLOGIC Flight Simulator

[Solandri]

Which later became Microsoft Flight Simulator. Granddaddy of all the 3D games we have today.

CADAM

[niks42]

Formative 3D design package. Some might argue that MCS beat it to the punch, but it was the second largest suite of programs in the world at the time (second only to IBMs Engineering Desigh System, EDS).

Re:CADAM

[niks42]

And before anybody says it, CADAM was 2D - it was Dassault who extended it to CATIA / CAEDS which added the all-important third dimension.

Are you really that pedentic?

[sirwired]

Why can Computer Science only include the mathematical aspects of the discipline? You are essentially trying to draw a line between theoretical and applied science and insisting Computer Science only includes the theoretical half. The study of historical applications is part of Human/Computer interaction, which most certainly is a branch of CS.

It's true that the practice of software development is more properly called Software (not Computer) Engineering, but in practice few US schools break that out into a separate course of study. (Which is really quite a shame; most practicing software developers would be a lot better off knowing more about Software Architecture and less about, say, compiler design. And I dare say that the CS department would be much better teaching it than the blundering that goes on in the Business School under the rubric of "Information Management" courses.)

P.S. If you seriously thought a CompE was the person to talk to about software development, you apparently don't know many, if any, CompE's. In my school, we were roughly 1/2 CompSci, and 1/2 EE's, with more electives than either. We certainly didn't have any more requirements in Software Development than the CompSci majors did.

Re:Are you really that pedentic?

[Samantha Wright]

You might want to see other replies—the CompE thing has already been discussed. (My experience is that pure CS majors are even worse software developers than computer engineers.)

But, yes, I am being that pedantic, and furthermore, you should be, too. Why? Because "CS = theory" still shapes the curriculum and the educational goals of professors at universities. The only institutions I've seen that offered dedicated software development programs (not merely a stream within a theoretical framework) are community colleges. That's why people in business complain about unprepared CS grads; because while they've been heavily educated in the mathematics of computer science, the mentality found in a CS department is not what real-world software development expects.

I'm bringing all of this up not because I don't value software engineering and development, but because I think it exists in the shadow of theoretical CS. It should be given its due as a unique engineering program, but few if any institutions I know of actually do that.

Dan Silvas

[Highway_Tramper]

Deluxe Paint series. I preferred "True Brilliance" but DPaint was the Daddy. AdPro & ImageFX was awesome too.

games

[Anonymous Coward]

I would throw in computer games.
They did a lot to boost the power and performance of the hardware and made the computer more than just a work tool introducing it into homes and families.

Now, as to what specific game, I don't have a clue.

SCORCH.EXE

[Anonymous Coward]

If Wendall T. Hicken's Scorched Earth isn't the mother of all ballistic style strategy games, then I don't know what is.

I can't be the only one with too many hours spent wasted on that one. Game was damn addictive for what it was. It wasn't just the shooting at other tanks with things like funky bombs, but there was the economic aspect which made one reconsider early rewards vs. the long game in terms of weapons and defense upgrades. (At least if you played a game for more than 5 rounds or so.)

Of course there's the ever so popular Angry Birds now which copys some of Scorch's mechanics, but I find it still pales in comparison to the original.

Ascii Express and/or AppleNet

[ravenswood1000]

Two telecommunications packages that did were very influential in the early days

automatic differentiation

[Anonymous Coward]

in 1963 my dad wrote a program that performs automatic differentiation with guaranteed results. As a result of that and other efforts interval arithmetic got as big as what it is today. I have the original manual to that program still... I think it's worthy of some attention.

Of course if that doesn't pique your interest we already have one of his earlier manuals in the computer history museum, a little number from 1948 given to him by a guy named Von Neumann. IF your name is Von Neumann for some reason the computer history museum curator lights up.

WordPerfect

[Anonymous Coward]

WordPerfect was the killer app - they asked lawyers what features they needed, added them to version 4, and absolutely destroyed the word processor market. Even into the 2000s, legal firms were using WP 5.1. Now that is success. If WP's Windows version had not been a steaming pile of user interface badness, WP would probably still be the #1 software package for legal firms. Microsoft Word won in the 90s because WP for Windows was so awful. Someone may not know about some random Mac software package from the 80s, but I can't imagine them not knowing about WP.

Re:WordPerfect

[Anonymous Coward]

WP would probably still be the #1 software package for legal firms

I think it still is as no other software can do legal numbering correctly,

Computer Scientists don't make UIs

[Anonymous Coward]

The role of the Computer Scientist is to study and make the tools that make a computer useful to others. As such they shouldn't be making UIs - instead they should be making the tools for UI designers, or more likely, the tools to make those tools e.g. compilers and operating systems.

Picking the colours and arrangement of pixels is an artists job. Working out how best to store and place them on the screen is closer to what concerns a Computer Scientist.

Elite

[coofercat]

Elite, for me, made me wonder and guess how the heck they did it. To this day I don't really know (although have since given up really trying to find out). It also was what would later be called "virtual reality" long before anyone though of such a thing.

Later, I remember Ultimate Software coming out with Speech for the BBC Micro. That didn't get much traction, but it's pretty damn clever. Beyond that, Mosaic was pretty cool. So was Wii Sports. The Apple Newton was too, although I never really got a good play with one.

NetWare was a killer app!

[Terje Mathisen]

For about 5+ years, Novell NetWare was indeed a killer app, it was the _only_ functional File/Print server for PCs!

From a computer architecture viewpoint NetWare had a lot of interesting ideas, including (by far) the most efficient sw stack I have ever seen:

Back around 1990 Drew Major had bummed the File Read Request code to the point where it needed just 300 clock cycles to do:

a) Pick up incoming packet
b) Detect that this was a file read request
c) Check that the user had the proper access rights to this file
d) Locate the relevant data in the the file cache (otherwise queue a physical read request)
f) Construct the response packet
    and
g) Return the response to the client

A bit later, around 1993-1995 Novell had their Multi-Master distributed Directory Service which from day one was far more functional that anything Microsoft has been able to write up to now.

Lotus Notes also had some good ideas, mostly related to replication and synchronization, allowing data to migrate to wherever it was needed/used.

Terje

FLINT

[John_Sauter]

If you are interested in early software, consider FLINT. FLINT was a floating-point package for the IAS computer, which was designed by John von Neumann in the early 1950s. FLINT was intended to be a high-level language which could be implemented on other computers.

FLINT, "which, as far as its user is concerned, transforms our machine into a slower, less sophisticated instrument for which coding is much simpler," insulated the end user from having to communicate directly with the machine. "The planned general external language should be influenced as little as possible by the peculiarities of the machine; in other words, it should be as close as possible to the thinking of the programmer" it was explained. The user "need not know machine language at all, even, and in particular, while debugging his program."

The above paragraph is from Turing's Cathedral: the origins of the digital universe by George Dyson, 2012, ISBN 987-1-4000-7599-7, page 318. The quotations are from "Institute for Advanced Study Electronic Computer Project Monthly Progress Report, January 1957", page 3. See also http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2012/04/04/pages/1670/index.xml?page=7&.

The plugs and wires...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that formed the programs that ran on Colussus. Breaking the German ciphers had a huge impact on the outcome of WWII.

Because MacPaint sucked...

[IamIanB]

... the real answer should be Kid Pix. That was a game changer. Also, the first RTS, Dune.

well back then IT was very differnt also bill gate

[Joe_Dragon]

well back then IT was very differnt also bill gates / jobs / others dropped out of school. Jobs dropped out and started taking classes drop in as he did not like the required classes. But Even then it's one thing to develop code and some very different to install / setup systems.

WriteNow

[Anonymous Coward]

WriteNow was everything MacWrite should've been. Completely awesome. It's only trouble was the codebase was terrible and couldn't be ported anywhere. R.I.P. WriteNow.

Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad

[Bobtree]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

Re:"Jumpman" (c64), Archon, & "Barbarian" (Ami

[Anonymous Coward]

Jumpman: set the standard for 'playability' & 'fun'. I remember making fun of it when I saw the underwhelming graphics, but it had me hooked the first time I played it

Exactly. "Games" are not about "graphics". Never were. They are about having fun, and jumpman did that well. Too powerful graphics often meant that game designers spent too much effort on looks, and little on gameplay. When all you had was a c64 (or earlier machines), the games had to be fun. They certainly couldn't sell on looks alone.

Before Reagan was president.

[Futurepower(R)]

When I said "before Reagan", I meant "before Reagan was president of the United States". The huge economic damage allowed because of Reagan's ignorance, carelessness, and willingness to reward supporters didn't begin until after he was elected president. See this 1986 L.A. Times article: 'Star Wars' Leads All Defense Costs: Anti-Missile Program Fast Becoming a Solidly Entrenched Part of Budget. Quote: "About 6,500 scientists have signed a pledge not to work on 'Star Wars.' "

"Low cost" hardware: Exactly correct. In the beginning, still quite expensive.

More about Electric Pencil: This 1982 InfoWorld article is interesting: "Electric Pencil, first micro word processor".

Quote: As Electric Pencil began to sell successfully, Shrayer was amazed at the demand for his product. He considered naming his firm the Electric Pencil and Eraser Company, but settled on Michael Shrayer Software. He sent a few brochures to dealers and the response was overwhelming.

Another quote: "We always felt that if Shrayer had had the inclination to upgrade Pencil, that no one could have taken that market away from him. Electric Pencil was like Kleenex and Coke. It was generic, and he could have owned the microcomputer word-processing market."

The California culture in the late 70s encouraged "do your own thing", but Michael Schrayer was the most counter-cultural person I've ever met, in both good and self-defeating ways.

Re:Before Reagan was president.

[operagost]

Your partisan diatribe is wholly out of place in this discussion. Even if your knowledge of history was not so lacking, your contribution would be useless.

Re:Before Reagan was president.

[Futurepower(R)]

I posted the link to the L.A. Times article to show an example of Ronald Reagan's inattention. His son thought the same thing: Reagan Son Claims Dad Had Alzheimer's as President Quote:

"Watching the first of his two debates with 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, I began to experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true. At 73, Ronald Reagan would be the oldest president ever reelected. Some voters were beginning to imagine grandpa -- who can never find his reading glasses -- in charge of a bristling nuclear arsenal, and it was making them nervous. Worse, my father now seemed to be giving them legitimate reason for concern. My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered." Page 205.

There are many other such sources.

The most important of all:

[Anonymous Coward]

Custer's Revenge

VAX STAX

[Anonymous Coward]

In the days of VAX DECWARS was one of the earliest video games, I remember playing on my Air Craft Carriers radar consoles in 1978.

my opinion - so it must be correct

[Anonymous Coward]

MUD ( multi-user Dungeon)
Elite for any Brit of the age was a reason to accept the crappy bbc named microcomputer for educational purposes your parents bought at the behest of your secondary school.

dbase

Cubase on the Atari ST

and the usual suspects visicalc and wordstar

Re:I met Michael Shrayer, author of Electric Penci

[tehcyder]

I think the GP meant to say "in California, before Reagan was the US President". Having California and Reagan next to each other made you think that he meant "in California, before Reagan was California's governor."

SoftLandingSoftware (SLS)

[Anonymous Coward]

Like some or many of you, I've been around computers since the early 80's and experienced the joys of now-arcane languages, communicating on long-forgotten nets (NEARNET,...), and the birthing of the earliest PC's.

Nothing made as big a difference as having the ability to fill up 16 or more floppies with SLS and 'compute' from the comfort of my home

Apple II Gutenberg?

[houbou]

Proof that Desktop Publishing can be done easily with 2 disk drives and a 3 disk app library! :)

Desqview, SideKick, Turbo-Lightning, debug.com

[elmohound]

These three were killer apps under MS-DOS that themselves were killed by MS-Windows.

Desqview (useful for MS-DOS based multi-tasking and mixing graphics and text)

Sidekick (just like a little PDA on your MS-DOS box)

Turbo-lightning (pop-up spell-checker)

debug.com (write and run little machine-language apps that could be emailed without MIME)

Hello world

[gozar]

I can't believe this wasn't the first post!

My Favorite

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that IBM PC DOS 6.0 was a landmark in software. It made a huge difference back in its day. I know that most people think in terms of apps but Dos was an important part of computing and IBM just made a superior DOS.

The spreadsheet

[Anonymous Coward]

VisiCalc

the beginning of modern office automation

[bobwyman]

ALL-IN-1 and Notes....

You're missing some gems

[Anonymous Coward]

telnet and ftp. They made it possible to work with multiple computers, remotely.

vi and emacs. They made it possible to edit files on almost any (sane) computer that you found yourself on.

Flight Simulator not m$ original

[oldestgeek]

It was developed by Bruce Artwick at his company, SubLOGIC in 1976+. Finally sold copyright to m$ in1996.

Much SDS/XDS software deserved merit.

[NikeHerc]

Their Fortran IV compiler and MetaSymbol assembler were works of art. Their UTS and CP-V operating systems could host 50-70 time-sharing users in 2MB (yes, two megabytes) of memory, which is all you could hang on their biggest mainframes.

Recently when I booted a laptop running XP, I started email, then fired up the windows task manager and sorted the process list by descending memory usage. The top ten processes summed to 383 megabytes! This is equivalent to the physical memory of 191 maxed-out Sigma 9s!

The ability of the SDS/XDS folks to provide so much functionality in so little memory is a lost art.

Altos

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, WordStar and Multiplan were quite popular on early Altos. I've been using the too. Not much lately, but maintained those up till early -90's for one customer. I assume you are talking about MP/M running versions. Which model you have? Is it with 5 1/4" or 8" floppy drives?

ac

ps. I stil recall the sound of Epxon FX 100 printer and the smell of the system. I just can't find the large "Altos packed with fresh ideas" sign I used to have on my wall :)

Re:Altos

[Bing Tsher E]

I've owned the Altos 580, which was an 8080 based box running CP/M or MP/M. But my Altos box now is an Altos 586, which is an 8086 based box. Like the other multiuser Altos boxes it has serial ports to attach multiple dumb terminals. One is the Console Port and there are four User ports. I have images of the OS Install diskettes, but not original diskettes. Sometime I need to make diskettes out of those images and bring that box up proper. Right now it has multiuser Xenix but some sort of business package and no Unix toolchain, compiler, etc.

databases...

[Jawnn]

dBase and/or Paradox were a very big deal, when it came to developing desktop applications that required anything approaching the functionality of a "real" relational database. No, they're were not client/server systems (not initially, at least) but they brought big change to the PC.

How about some Mainframe OSs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll vote for the VM/370, VP/SP, and VM/XA series.

Turbo Pascal 3.02

[Anonymous Coward]

Released in 1986, Turbo Pascal 3.02 was a marvel of design and pith. It was a full blown pascal editor/compiler, featuring wordstar editor (you could compose letters on it also, instead of writing software), was fast, could compile/run from the editor, and sucked up the volumous space of 39k (39 kilobytes). To be that good and that small, it must have been entirely created by hand (bit editor).

How about KA9Q which did a lot for TCP/IP

[Yoik]

Ham radio and many non-radio amateurs took on IP communications use due to the Ka9q platform. One of the early success stories for open source.

Magellan

[ipxodi]

Lotus Magellan. Not as old as some of the real oldies like Viscalc, but in the early 90s it was the absolute best file explorer available. Really haven't see the same ability to browse, manage and view file contents (without launching them) again.
Vintage print ad

Good idea to teach about it

[ecloud]

A course that covers the history of software would be about as useful as, say, music appreciation or art history. It could be taught in a non-CS department just to get some of that liberal arts flavor, maybe even count as one of the required humanities credits.

MINIX

[dangerousdaze]

I've been reading /. for years but this is the first time I've ever wanted to post. My vote goes to Tanenbaum's MINIX and his excellent book on OS design and implementation. Not only was it a real OS you could run on your pre-historic PC, but you could see how it was written, and hope one day to emulate it yourself.

DNA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuff said

perhaps they were using computers

[Anonymous Coward]

instead of macs

Re:If C compiler becomes the most valuable program

[jknapka]

Paper tape -- or perhaps piano rolls -- as the first reel software storage method.

I see what you did there.

Re:well CS IS NOT IT / NETWORKING / DESKTOP / SEVE

[DragonWriter]

CS is not IT, or Networking? Um...who do you think developed AD? A person who studied metallurgy?

Just because people who study CS may go on to work in IT or networking doesn't make CS into IT or networking (instead of, as it is, a discipline that bears the same relation to each that physics bears to civil or mechanical engineering) anymore than the fact that plenty of software developers studied, say, Philosophy make Philosophy the study of software development.

SPICE, the grand-daddy of most of the rest

[smprather]

We wouldn't have the processors to run most of this software without the seed - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE .

Early software that (IMHO) changed the world

[metaforest]

Williams Electronics Space invaders -- first use of a micro-processor (Intel 8080) in an arcade video game. Prior to this system, video games were built using discrete TTL display controllers and State-Machines. Atari continued building discrete TTL systems for a few more years until they saw what 'The Steves' did with the 6502 and the Apple I.
Woz's sweet-16 library and mini-assember.
Microsoft BASIC (Applesoft BASIC and other variants.)
Conway's Life
Apple DOS 3.3 -- fastest (and simplest hardware) 5.25" floppy-disc storage system on the home market for years.
Visicalc
A23D1 3D graphics library for Apple ][ and other systems by Bruce Artwick. (1979)
A2FS1 3D flight simulator by Bruce Artwick (1979)
Three Mile Island -- rare reactor sim with disasters...
LISA ('LI ZA') Lazer's Interactive Symbolic Assembler/debugger (1981 IDE)
Locksmith ][ nibble copier/patch/sector editor.
Any of the Beagle Brothers tool kits.
Swashbuckler -- well done 2D sword duel simulation.
Sneakers -- used the disc-drive motors as a sound-effect.
Apple UCSD PASCAL system -- Many kids my age had our first exposure to structured programming in this PASCAL IDE.
Magic Window word processor. (scrolling 80 column word processor for 40 column displays)
Scott Adams adventure series.
Wizardry Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Castle Wolfenstein (Apple ][ version)
Robot War (apple ][) simulated robotics game. CGW sponsored tournaments for several years.
Corvus Constellation file-server and 1Mbps network platform for Apple ][ systems.
Adobe PostScript -- made modern desktop publishing possible
AppleTalk -- made sharing laser printers feasible for office environments (per node costs for Ethernet 10Base2 and 10BaseT were still too high for for a number of years)
Word for Mac
Excel (Mac)
MacPaint
MacWrite
MacDraw
Photoshop
Illustrator
PageMaker
HyperCard
Band-In-A-Box
SoundEdit (destructive waveform editor -- started life as an 8 bit sample editor)
Audacity -- (first commonly available wave editor with binaural audio filters)

Re:well CS IS NOT IT / NETWORKING / DESKTOP / SEVE

[tilante]

"X is not Y" is not equivalent to "X is not required for Y", nor "X is not important to Y". To give similar statements: "Mathematics is not physics." "Physics is not mechanical engineering." Both of those statements are true - but if you want to work in the field of physics, understanding mathematics is essential. If you want to work in the field of mechanical engineering, understanding physics is essential.

The person who developed AD is a software engineer. He undoubtedly studied computer science, and might even have a computer science degree... but that doesn't make computer science be the same thing as software engineering, any more than the fact that a mechanical engineer might have a degree in physics makes those the same thing.

ISWIM

[hendrikboom]

ISWIM, by Landin. I suspect it was vapourware, but it inspired all the (nearly) functional languages with sensible syntax that have showed up since.

ISWIM is an acronym for If you See What I Mean. I don't know why he left out the 'Y'. It was presented in his paper 'The Next 700 Programming Languages.

-- hendrik

Editors?

[unixisc]

Actually, talking about text editors, I remember 2 that were particularly useful in programming, particularly in putting together Verilog code. On Windows, there was Borland Brief, and on Unix, there was a program called Crisp. What they had in common was that both would allow you to delete or insert characters in a particular column, which was just fantastic for creating arrays, or bus signals and similar indexed data.

Wonder whether emacs or vim or elvis or pico or nano or... have anything remotely similar?

Xywrite

[Anonymous Coward]

Extremely fast, fully keystroke/keyboard configurable word processor.
Essentially it drove publishing software and layouts as it was based on the Atex typesetter.

NYTimes and others adopted it and churned out easy stories.

Orphanware now, and available on the web, Xywrite begat NotaBene, an academic research suite for referencing and making articles and papers an ease.

FORTRAN I compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

A hard act to follow. It implemented a lot of optimisations that were considered leading-edge 20 years later, and set the bar really high for every compiler since.

Re:Influential? Dbase

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who can reply to this thread, and NOT include Dbase II, Paradox, and DB2, just doesn't get it.

Re:Influential? Dbase

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I mention COBOL, and FORTRAN? Sorry about that.